I think collective, democratic ownership is kind of the opposite of authoritarianism, right haha? But I agree choice is important! Thanks for your comment!
Eh, I can see your point. But Tailscale is a very different kind of centralized. It's just fancy, more convenient Wireguard at the end of the day. If I wanted to move away from it, it's pretty easy. Moving off of something like Google Photos however, was much harder in comparison.
Haha! "Showing a lot of ankle" – I've never heard that before! Thanks for reading and commenting – very cool that you've managed to successfully host email. I'm sad advertisers and spammers have turned that into essentially an unusable technology.
Definitely a proud self hoster, but the main point is really that I don't think we're going to live in a world where self-hosting is the dominant method of using internet-based apps and services. Would love to be wrong though! Maybe we'll all be self-hosting email in a few years!
Totally agree! I relied a lot on Claude Code to help me with issues I was having setting up hardware encoding in Immich. But I also think – as accessible as LLMs are as a tool – they still don't make the complexities of self-hosting trivial. Maybe they'll get there, but I feel like LLMs really are just another coding abstraction. It's like a programming language. You still need to know how the language works and how the underlying "bare metal" works to make anything reliably.
But, I could be wrong! Thanks for reading and commenting!
Thanks for your comment! I still think though that this puts way too much on each individual – no matter how easy you make the tech. But, I could see a world where just like running tech support for my parent's computers, I also do so for their server. That's an interesting take!
Thank you for your comment this is really enlightening! I'd love to learn more about services you're hosting for friends and neighbors and how that works technically and socially. If you're interested in connecting – please email me [email protected]
You're right! Having a VPS or similar offsite server is also totally self-hosting! Just for the sake of narrative and suburbia analogy, I chose to leave this detail out. Like you mentioned, practically they're mostly the same thing and come with the same pros and cons no matter where the server is. Thanks for your comment!
I think that's a great setup! I actually am still using Google Photos for this reason. I think of it as a kind of "offsite" backup. I take a lot of photos and videos though so I'm probably going to have to move to a more affordable approach like Backblaze. Thanks for your comment!