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The Verge Takes on Self-Hosting for the Masses
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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This is actually true, but it doesn't speak to why self hosting is "impossible" and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.
There's no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.
I'll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting -- especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)
If you want self-hosting for everyone, then I suspect you're gonna have something like a console -- a self-contained box that requires virtually no configuration.
So something like a Synology NAS, I guess.
And even that is not for the masses. It's good, it's for the medium savvy folks, but it will never be for my wife - or for my mother!
I suppose that that's an "appliance-like computer" though I was thinking more of general-purpose hardware that takes software modules.
Like, think of how you install a game on a console. Maybe you set up your account at the beginning and plonk in a wireless password, but beyond that, there's no further essential configuration for the thing to work. Same kind of idea. You get box, do initial minimal setup. After that, you install software modules, and they have no more configuration involved.
If more configuration is required, then it's just not going to be something sufficiently accessible for everyone to use.
That's probably not what the typical user on this community is looking for, but I think that that's probably what would be required if one wants everyone in the public to be able to self-host.