this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I'm far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.
I think there's a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.
Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you're going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you're wrong), and it's extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.
Kinda not the point, but at the risk of starting a huge tangent: yes, there are a bunch of self-hosted applications that are reasonably practical and easy to install, but there's still the layer of having to understand how to access a thing in your LAN from each device, and ideally you'd want some sort of dedicated server running at all times and a bunch of this stuff is provided in multiple formats, including containerized versions or versions for virtual machines, all of which is way over the heads of normie users.
The closest to a fire-and-forget self-hosting platform is maybe Home Assistant or perhaps some of the commercial NAS sellers, like the Synology suite of apps that will mooostly set themselves up. Maybe Plex. But even those don't work in quite the way mainstream users think about applications working. You really need something you plug in and it goes. Maybe the branded Home Assistant hardware is closest to that, but HA itself is so overengineered and customizable it's not so much the start of a commercial self-hosting revolution as a relatively accessible hobby project rabbit hole.
I hadn't, but at a glance, while well intentioned that's pretty much exactly the "still a bridge too far" thing I'm talking about.
Effectively that mimics the interface (bit uglier, but same idea) you get in a Synology NAS or other commercial home server services.
Here's the problem, Jellyfin itself might already be alien tech. The type of solution they're proposing is trying to streamline something end users don't even know exists.
And I'd be moderately interested on it at my level of awareness, but now I am looking at redoing my own self hosting machine from scratch and wondering if some of the things I'm doing with it will be doable with this, so as of right now, moving to it is more complicated, not less.
The bar self hosting needs to be mainstream is this: I click a button on a Windows PC and it downloads a piece of software. I click "install" and said software installs itself like a normal application.
There is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
Alternately, I buy a little box, plug it in and there is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.
The only examples that approximate this in my view are Plex (NOT Jellyfin) for scenario one and HA Yellow/Green for scenario two. And even those two will set up the hardware and software but you'll still be pointing at a LAN IP for access. They both will only do remote access via a subscription and a connection to an external could-based service, so they aren't even a fully self hosted solution if you want to go with the "easy" proper external access.
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.
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.
I think these do exist, but they're in such a sea of shit that most users scrolling on their phones can't find them. Shameless apps have an intractable engagement/marketing advantage over them, as do the 'lets get acquired by Big Tech' ones.
I guess big companies could engage in this, but... shrug.
Hassle-free self hosting is hard, yeah, AI or not. Not going to argue with that one bit.