Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
I would love to but the main issue is I don’t have motivation, the time to learn, or the money to set it up the way I’d like. I can’t even get a pihole running atm, despite trying. I once had a server on my old desktop but couldn’t even take the time to rip all my movies to Jellyfin. I’m also concerned about having all my stuff in one location (and if that’s the same with a corp then that doesn’t change with me self hosting 😬). I would love it for privacy but there’s a few options that are convenient and supposedly secure enough that I am willing to make the trust compromise. I would really like to own my router or set up that pihole though, but see first sentence :/
I agree more people should self host.
Disclaimer: I’m fediverse developer myself of Mbin. And also host all my services and websites.
Most people don’t make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It’s difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.
I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.
That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity. I’m going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want the hassle.
Most people don’t know how to self-host. Most people don’t know what self-hosting is. Most people don’t know what hosting is.
This post is a prime example of a weird logical fallacy that seems to permeate the tech world in particular, and which goes something like this:
- For me, this task is trivial.
- That is because I have spent a lifetime developing the knowledge, skills and experience to make that task trivial.
- I lack the self-awareness and intellectual honesty to understand that.
- Therefore, I assume that anyone for whom this task is not trivial is simply lazy, and has only themselves to blame for their failure to perform this task.
- Therefore, I am very superior and very smart.
To add between 2. and 3.: I choose to spend my limited time and energy on managing self-hosted infrastructure rather than on other hobbies or life demands.
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I thought about setting up my own personal instance, but I didn’t want to have to deal moderate any CSAM.
I self host a cheap VPS but my main worry is keeping it secure and locked down. I’m not a security expert so while I use it to store and share files I don’t upload anything personal to it.
I self host a Nextcloud instance at home but it isn’t accessible from outside my local network. I want to keep it as secure as possible. I back up the files to three different mediums every couple of days and I think that’s the part a lot of non techie people might struggle with.
My wife’s doesn’t understand tech at all so if anything happens to me, she can unplug the storage box and plug it into a windows box via usb, giving her easy access to all the files. Anything more complicated than that and it’ll never work.
It’s expensive. Sure you can start off with an old laptop, but soon you’ll want external storage to hold more images/media.
Then you’ll realize that if you just got a dedicated mini-pc you could host more containers. Oh! What if you get multiple identical PCs and then you cluster them for HA/zero downtime maintenance?!
Shit, but then you would need more than the little integrated 4 port switch on your Netgear router.
No matter! Switch to a virtualized pfsense, ditch the Netgear router and go for a 12 port switch.
Smash cut to a few years later when you’re spec’ing fiber switches/SFP+ for 10Gbps and Proxmox nodes with an extra 4GB ram so your ceph cluster doesn’t fall over randomly… Wait, why is my electric bill now $400/mo?
I’ve been seriously considering downgrading my homelab, but at this point between the *arr stack and Immich, I’m not sure if I can.
Fantastic! No notes.
To make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe
Im sorry, is this a real question? Honestly, I cant help but feel like youre still in high school. This is such a self obsessed question its hurting my head.
This is like asking “Why doesnt everyone just learn roman numeral analysis and use the progression i-VI-III-VII to write a song that people like?” Its a deeply niche knowledge base/skill.
If youre asking this in earnest, do some deep reflection on how distinct and varied human experience is. The answer is that people have different skills and interests and your lived experience has nothing to do with other people’s lives.
I get where you’re coming from but this is a pretty full on response isn’t it? I work in a technical organisation and plenty there don’t do it despite having the skill set. I assume this is more the framing of the question not “why doesn’t the average granny who worked as a teacher her whole life self-host?”
Fair point and well made at that. Full on can be appropriate. This community has an unearned superiority complex. With that in mind, I stand by the full on-ness.
Yeah, probably for the same reason few people sew their own t-shirts, knit their pullovers and repair the plumbing and electrical work in their house by themselves.
The power cost isnt worth running a server 24/7. I dont want to invest in redundancy or storage space for a social media site. I dont want to have my account linked directly to my home ip for privacy and security reasons. I’d rather use pooled resources from the local instance and donate $20 every now n then.
The lack of knowledge, which others here already pointed out, is only one part of it. I have a knowledge due to my education and work, but I really don’t want to. I selfhost the stuff, that I use personally and locally and access it through a VPN. But a ActivityPup Server, that would need to be reachable from outside, I really dont want to bother with.
Just doing a port-forwarding, like you suggested, is not a great idea security-wise, if you dont take additional precautions. You’d probably want the publicly hosted stuff in a completely different subnet from your LAN, that all your other devices use. Or at least have VLANs setup. All of which is not easily possible, or even impossible, with the standard consumer networking hardware most have at home.
Additionally, you’d need to take care of system and application updates, backups and so on, which takes a significant amount of time.
All in all I really don’t care enough about social media in general to justify the hassle.
Same reason a lot of people don’t change their own oil in their vehicles.
Sometimes it’s just more convenient to pay someone else to do things
Oh wait you’re talking about fediverse instances. For me, I would be worried about reliability. Like if I was travelling and my apartment had a power outage or something
