I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.

He complains that the software he uses can’t handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.

The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who’s hosting the instance in their attic.

The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it’s wrong. If you’re part of this community, you’re probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you’re reading this, you already know that we don’t have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.

I like the article, but agree with so many of the comments here as well.

Ultimately I think one thing I’d love for would be a way to simply provide services (like Immich) for people but where the client is end to end encrypted, and neither the user nor the service has to worry about the how.

Example: how can I share an Immich with my family and friends, but where I don’t have access to any of their data. I.e. what signal does, but immich or any other service. I want to share my server with friends/family, but I don’t want access to any of their data. It isn’t a lack of trust, it’s that I don’t want that as even something they have to worry about

That same concept then extends here to community hosting. If we can solve the problem for a few, it should be scalable to many.

The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything

Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!