this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Selfhosted

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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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[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything

[–] elDalvini@discuss.tchncs.de 27 points 3 days ago (2 children)

He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That's not the same everything being owned by private companies.

[–] baod_rate@programming.dev 16 points 3 days ago

In fact, that model (conceptually, though not technically) is how most fediverse software already work

[–] NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?

Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.

Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn't usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you're going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We're talking massive fines and/or jail time.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm not talking about services here, but content itself.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

The point is that clouds aren't inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they've become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it's not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.

[–] maxwellfire@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There's so much to host that isn't related to pirated media sharing though. I host like 5 services and only one could be related to that. I know you clarified that you're talking about content, but there's also so much content that isn't related to pirating either. Like most of the fediverse for example