Comment on Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host

• SelfhostedResearch@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yeah, it surprised me too! If you want to read more about it, check out the paper titled “Towards Privacy and Security in Private Clouds: A Representative Survey on the Prevalence of Private Hosting and Administrator Characteristics” by Gröber et al. (2024).

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  • Mniot@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Thanks for linking that. Reading the paper, it looks like the majority of the “self-host” population they’re capturing is people who have a WordPress site. By my reading, the wording of the paper would disqualify a wordpress.com-hosted site as “self-hosted”. But I’d be very suspicious of their methodology and would expect that quite a few people who use WP-hosted reported as self-hosted because the language is pretty confusing.

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  • kernelle@0d.gs ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Thanks for the source, super interesting read! I would’ve guessed 1-5% as well.

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• mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  My guess is that it also included things like the 12 year old hosting a Minecraft server.

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• nickhammes@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I suspect there’s a tendency of experts in something to think of people who do it narrowly as people doing at least as much as they are.

  The people who have a bunch of docker services, or complex multi-machine infrastructure are self-hosted software users, and probably in that 1-2% range. People who heard piholes are useful, so they bought a pi 3 and set it up are self-hosted software users. Somebody using an old desktop they got on Facebook marketplace for running Plex media are self-hosted software users… and so on. So are the people in their houses, some of their friends and family.

  Using that inclusive definition, being closer to 10% than 1% makes sense to me.

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