Self Hosting is an Unhelpful Term
fediverse ReDeCentralize Social Networks · 17 comments · 650 words · read ~806 times.
Mathew Duggan has a brilliant post called "Self-Hosting Isn't a Solution; It's A Patch". In it, he (correctly and convincingly) argues that compelling people to run their own computer services is a complex and distracting crutch for the current problems we face.
It's expensive to self-host, there are moderation problems, and the difficulty level is too high for most people.
But, in my opinion, I think he misunderstands something about self-hosting because, as a term, it is both misleading and unhelpful. When people say "Defund The Police" what they mean is "Move funds away from miliary style policing and give it to trained mental health professionals" - what people hear is "Abolish the police and let anarchy reign".
The ability to "Self Host" doesn't just mean "run this on a Raspberry Pi in your cupboard and be responsible for constant maintenance". Yes, you can do that if you're a masochist, but it isn't restricted to that.
To me, "Self-Hosting" means "I am in control of where I host something". I currently pay a company to host this blog. It has previously been hosted on Blogger, WordPress, my own VPS, and a variety of other services. Tomorrow I could decide to host it with a big company, or I could run it from my phone. I get to choose. That's what "Self-Hosting" is - a choice in where to host.
Similarly, Mastodon allows me self-host my account. I can have my content on one of the big servers and let them do moderation, storage, and maintenance for me - or I can move my account anywhere I choose. To a server in my cupboard and back again.
Email is similar. I know people who've gone from CompuServe, to HoTMaiL, to Gmail, to their own domain, then to OutLook. Their address-book moves with them. Forwarding rules ensure incoming email is routed correctly. They can choose to actively moderate spam, or outsource it. They can pay a company to host, keep backups in their basement, or watch adverts in return for services.
I agree with nearly everything Mathew says in his post. It is absurdly privileged to think that running your own services is something normal people want to do and are capable of doing. Strong regulation helps everyone, people want simplicity, and ecosystems can be fragile.
But witness all the people moving over from Twitter to new networks. Do they care where their data is hosted and how it is maintained? No! But they want to move their social graph with them. And when BlueSky and Mastodon collapse, people will want to move again.
In the UK, I have the ability to move my phone number between hundreds of providers. If I'm particularly techy, I can even run my own infrastructure and route the number there. People love the fact that they can leave crappy service providers and move somewhere cheaper or with with better customer service or whatever it is they value. I think that's a form of self-hosting; I get to choose who provides my services.
Similarly, I believe people have a desire for "self-hosting" which is difficult for them to articulate. They want to move their data around - be it old photos, a social graph, or a username. Most of them don't really care about the underlying technology (and why should they?) but they do care about continuity of service and being able to escape crappy service providers.
So, that's my reckons. Self-Hosting means you can choose where to host, and I think most people can find value in that.
What do you think?
@Edent IMHO Docker front ends make the difficulty of self hosting even in the traditional oil changing sense a lot easier.
That said I think your comparison to defund the police is apt.
@Edent also think it does pay for itself if it replaces certain SaaS applications. Stuff like Trello comes to mind.
@Edent 100% agree. I spend a good $1,500 per year to "self host" my own web and mail servers, plus I have *most* of the technical acumen to do the job. Does it actually buy me privacy? I certainly wouldn't be the farm. Also, I have my server in a data center. To do otherwise would require quite a bit more money for a "business service". And let's not start about reputation, break-in risks, disk failures, etc.
@blog Excellent comment. 👏
An aphorism I read long ago about material things also applies to digital things needing maintenance
The more stuff you own the more your stuff owns you.
(or words to that effect).
Incl for the privileged, competent, with spare time.
Anyone w experience of "smart" devices never a mind self-hosted ecosystem has learned this. The solution is self-controlled hosting but a better term is needed.
@Edent Self-hosting is not expensive. It's like changing your own tyres though - not for everyone.
@eliotlear @Edent Let's be honest, the reality of it, if you switch from "free ad driven, and certainly not private" services to stuff that you pay for, it suddenly adds up. Here a bit for your notes taking app so it can sync, there a bit of blogging, some cloud storage, some photo management …
Each of these wanting €50-100/year. Multiply n times for n persons in your family.
And suddenly the $1500 does not sound that bad.
Ok, I'm lucky, I've got a stable IPv4 cable modem as a consumer 😉
@blog i like the phone number comparison 👍
It's a given and people wont accept anything less.
Self hosting is being in control of your own data/network.
@Edent I agree. I know some people see "self-hosting" as an extreme, and you're really only self-hosting if you can physically touch all hardware at any time. (But who provides that Internet connection, huh? By that definition you're not self-hosting, are you?)
To me too, self-hosting is about choice. Can I take what I have, put it somewhere else, and others don't notice (possibly apart from brief downtime during the transition)? If so, that likely qualifies. Whether I pay others is secondary.
Reminds me of my post a long time ago about why the mass adoption of Medium was a risk, because one day maybe you find you no longer own your work. That's not the same as me having a plex server running at home that I access to listen to my albums anywhere in the world
@Edent
This perfectly encapsulates my experience on the Fedi: I started out on a hosted instance, and as I learned more about how instances work I moved to a host in my home country, where I found and connected with people on a more local level. Then the techy in me got interested in running my own instance (I used to SysOp my own BBS in the ‘90s), but the demands—both financial and technical—proved to be too much of a headache so I moved to a managed self-hosting provider, which I eventually outgrew and I finally ended up on the instance where I began my journey.
The true power in decentralized solutions like Mastodon and the Fediverse is that people are free to choose their own path without being locked-in to a particular provider.
@neil
@blog I'm not quite at "raspberry pi" level but I did dabble in self-hosting a Minecraft server. I can understand where this inclination comes from, but I think it may be difficult to convince people outside the "in-group" that this is what it means based on the word parts.
Do you think this might be a niche for a separate term, like digital agency/data agency?
@blog I think that's a perceptive view (if you can self-host you can also other-host) so in a sense self-hosting is the existence proof that something is really open and possible to deploy autonomously.
However I'm more of an optimist about these things. I don't see why people can't self-host. I'm nobody special and I self-host. I don't want to say if I can do it anyone can do it but... It's not like there's some impenetrable magic involved here. It's all simple mechanism.
@Edent I see what you're saying but I think the affordance people need is "portability". I'd describe that as portability across a sliding scale of options, where different people will describe options on that scale as "self hosting" or not. "Managed hosting" and "SaaS" are also places on that scale.
@Edent I don't really disagree, but to add some nuance: literal self-hosting plants the seeds for user-owned cooperatives running services, which is IMHO the only way projects like the Fediverse can hope to scale to much more than the current number of MAUs. Sure, it can also be done to some extend on ever growing commercial hosting services, but you quite quickly reach a point where that is just not very cost effective compared to running your own second-hand server in a co-location center or a good home fiber connection.
mmphosis says:
I value privacy but lack money and have technical skills.
I used to pay $12 per year for a domain name and ran HTTP on a raspberry pi for over a decade. The tricky part was pointing the domain name to my IP address when it changed. This was made somewhat painful by the domain name company trying to up-sell other unneeded services.
apt install httpd; systemctl start httpdThat bit of code on the raspberry pi is a check box on Mac OS X 10.5: Sharing > Start Web Server.
I got rid of the domain name, and now use a subdomain on a free, no ad, web site, for now.
I try to avoid companies especially "big tech" and I don't like that the word "ecosystem" has been misappropriated. I think having sane defaults relieves a lot of the pain and cost. I believe that standards not dominated by "big tech", and regulation are helpful.
I run mostly Linux, and also Android, openbsd, and a bunch of legacy operating systems.
I use Firefox with a lot of the defaults turned off (geo, pocket, telemetry, ...) I should probably use LibreWolf. I am looking at servo and LadyBird browsers.
I've started to use git which I find very user hostile. It is, however, fairly easy to self-host git. I refuse github as it could collapse on the whim of it's owner. The enemy of open source has the power to say "goodbye" to all of those open source repos at anytime.
At the moment, I am using Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct.Q6_K.llamafile because it runs locally.
I don't expect anyone to run the same things I do. I do feel very fortunate that I can. I very much appreciate open source developers that have made their software available to the public.
Good post. It sort of makes me think of it as ‘digital autonomy’ (I can make the decisions which matter to me) versus ‘digital independence’ (I don’t need outside help).
‘Self hosting’ has threads of both, but it’s not often talked about as separate concerns.
Terence makes some good points when responding to Matthew Duggan. But I disagree a little. Self-hosted blogs have been around since the dawn of the Web in 1994, maybe before. I think it's more the fact that self-hosting is difficult and a bit unattainable in the social media landscape. Thoughts?
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