There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called “Opera Unite”. It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called “the fridge” where people could leave you post it notes.
They’d give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they’d proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.
tal@lemmy.today 1 year ago
If you want self-hosting for everyone, then I suspect you’re gonna have something like a console – a self-contained box that requires virtually no configuration.
dandi8@kbin.social 1 year ago
So something like a Synology NAS, I guess.
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And even that is not for the masses. It’s good, it’s for the medium savvy folks, but it will never be for my wife - or for my mother!
tal@lemmy.today 1 year ago
I suppose that that’s an “appliance-like computer” though I was thinking more of general-purpose hardware that takes software modules.
Like, think of how you install a game on a console. Maybe you set up your account at the beginning and plonk in a wireless password, but beyond that, there’s no further essential configuration for the thing to work. Same kind of idea. You get box, you install software module, no more configuration involved.
If more configuration is required, then it’s just not going to be something sufficiently accessible for everyone to use.
That’s probably not what the typical user on this community is looking for, but I think that that’s probably what would be required if one wants everyone in the public to be able to self-host.