this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I think there's a bit of misunderstanding there. I'm not saying we should force self-hosting. I'm saying that when you get enshittification to a certain point, the idea of a non-shitty service becomes a selling point and you can compete on that as a feature.
You see that in commercial software all the time. Davinci Resolve exists because nobody wants to deal with Adobe, ClipStudio grew for the same reason, then went around that loop and now Affinity is getting some attention, and so on.
So what I'm saying is a self-contained package/service for self-hosting has a good chance to compete on price and features with enshittified services. The problem with getting that out of the OSS community is that they typically have more decisionmaking power on the engineering side and you end up with overly flexible, customizable software no mom and pop normie would ever get into unless they're making a project out of it.
See, Jellyfin should be a hit. Everybody should have a Jellyfin server. But instead they have an overly powerful thing that is trying to allow you to customize the UI and incorporate every single piece of media and do everything Plex does except for the one useful thing Plex does which is give you Internet access to your library.
That's the opposite of what an eventually successful self-hosted thing would be. You want one thing that does one thing with zero hassle and has the hard feature but none of the superfluous easy features. That's why I'm saying HA, Plex and Synology are best positioned.
I think Synology is going the Plex route, where they are starting to enshittify their hardwareto sell you more hard drives. Their software is a better version of Yunohost already, though. And crucially they do provide a one click OpenVPN install, which is the still-too-complicated version of how all of this should work.
But if you really wanted to make some money one can envision a world in which a ISP (particularly a Starlink-style connect-anywhere ISP) sells you a one time stop package with a box that does your routing and also has a big app manager thing that sets you up for what you want. "It works just like Gmail but it's at your place" is the pitch, not "ironclad security and full access to set it up just like you want". That's for nerds.
And then you charge them for cloud backups, if you're clever.
Thanks for coming to my pitch, I'll be in meeting room 4 all week.
I guess what I am not understanding is why you would self host if youre not doing it for privacy and security. Who cares where the information is if the info gets to where it needs to be? If the user doesnt set it up just how they want and all decisions are made by a 3rd party, why not just centralize the information? That 3rd party can still implement all the spyware, telemetry and backdoors they want to into the software so to the end consumer it makes literally no difference other than the fact that now instead of everything being in "the cloud" you have to spend $100+ on a box that does the same thing the cloud did.
Because at some point the enshittification breaks the UX and the rising costs of services become more comparable.
I find that being a question so emblematic of the mindset in the current OSS community and a big cause of why it's hard for it to reach wide audiences.
The point I'm making is that commercial services are becoming increasingly less convenient and having worse UX. Convenience and UX are the only two things that matter for user-level software. Customization doesn't matter, security doesn't matter, control doesn't matter. Convenience and UX are it.
We're getting to the point where having your email hosted at home is becoming more convenient than having to endure a million warnings about how your inbox is 85% full and you should pay Google for storage. It's less convenient to set up and it has worse UX, though, so average users don't even consider it.
We're getting to the point where putting an offline file for whatever you want to watch in a drive is looping back around to being more convenient than going to a website to see which of a hundred streaming services has what you want to watch, then navigate past a bunch of updates and ads to get to it. We're getting to the point where having Google disable random features of your IoT stuff with no warning is worse than having them all plugged in to a local device via Zigbee or Matter. To where storing your files yourself may be on par for cost long term, where it may be easier to stream your old MP3 collection than deal with Spotify and so on.
But the software to do it is still a bridge too far. It doesn't have to be, but it's hard to get it to where it needs to go.