Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I think of it as a lab because it's my sandbox for me to do crazy server stuff at home that I'd never do on my production network at work, and I think that's why the name stuck, because back when systems were expensive as heck it was pretty much just us sysadmin guys hauling home old gear to mess with.
Yeah, that's exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It's just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you're not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.
And that's alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we're on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it's just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their "homelab" and pretend they're doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.
When Microsoft released Windows Home Server, I felt for sure that would ignite the flame. Yeah, it's windows, but in the right direction I thought as far as home servers go. I've always felt that every home should have a server of some type. We have so much digital data now that has replaced the filing cabinet full of birth certificates, deeds to properties, financial documents, pictures, media, etc. that not having one seems to me to be a bad idea.
I think if a home server package were simple enough even a cave man could do it, and it got the average non-tech person over the hump of scary computer tech they don't know, it would become a common appliance in homes and not the exception.
Yeah, we're almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you're most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.
I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.
The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus... and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.
The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There's just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren't are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.