Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.
Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.
It’s been around since 2010.
Samsung web browser uses chromium under the hood
A lumberjack may also argue GP don't care about environment laws if they had timbernews.
Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up. I agree, having a meta package that would set the system up as systemd would be an even lower barrier. But then again, there are podman commands that do this for you today anyway.
Self hosting could also imply buying a device that just does this with an additional management interface for updates. This could be build around a nuc/nas with above package. It still will require some knowledge to keep it maintained.
Then, you could offer maintaining them as a service again. Maybe there is value in that.
Update: apparently there is https://freedombox.org/ which is actually an appliance for this. Although it is more privacy focused and I don’t see a productivity or photo suite on it.
Because it requires people to also have knowledge about the ins and outs of docker and docker compose. If we are talking about web applications it is yet another layer that has been added over the years. It used to be that you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file transferring.
Of course, this was on shared webhosts in a time when VPSes were not really a thing yet or affordable. But, even on a VPS setting up a LAMP stack is relatively straightforward.
Once you add modern dockerized application to that mix you are now still looking at some sort of ingress to do the reverse proxy bit. So while it likely will not be Apache or nginx there will be some sort of layer there in addition to now having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that) and then also making sure your docker compose setup is in order.
It is not difficult *once you know how to* but it is another layer of knowledge and experience people need to acquire. That does make it less accessible for novices.
Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.
> having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that)
Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.
You are speeding past my point by a mile or two. With a shared webhost you get a ready lamp stack. In the late 90s early 2000s you could fairly easily get a wide array of software running that way. All you had to do is create a database in the hosters control panel, upload the package and you'd be on your way. Later in the 2000s one click installers came along for popular packages making it even easier. In fact, they are still around these days making it extremely easy to install a wide array of lamp based applications to these days.
There are very few options these days to get started as easily these days with modern non lamp tech stacks. The only thing I am familiar with (other than the product presented to us in this post) is pikapods, [which only offers a limited selection of available applications](https://www.pikapods.com/apps). There are a few others, also catalog based, though they more seem to focus on deploying on other platforms for you. Other than that you start to quickly move to more complex hosting solutions aimed at business and scaling. Or platforms that are cloud platforms with all the added complexity to navigate and figure out before you can deploy docker containers. Not to mention ridiculous situation that a few of the ones I know about have pivoted to being "agentic compute providers" whatever that means and certainly will confuse a novice. Which means that the "practical" advice given is often to "just" set up a VPS. And yes, many VPS providers will provide an image with docker enabled, but that is just the start.
> Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.
That, in fact, is another layer of complexity people will then have to figure out. Most information I am aware of these days does claim that it is better to run containers rootless or at the very least make sure the user in the container is non root. The fact that we are both convinced of the opposite tells you how confusing it must be for a novice.
The overall point I am trying to make isn't even about the exact details. It is that for hosting something these days there is much more required surrounding knowledge required before you can get started in most cases.
Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall knowledge of what to compose to get the same result.
The dust will settle and we should go back to a nearer gap in I hope a few years, until the. it might be a glacier age for self-hosting.
You could argue it’s much easier on the software side, because self hosting Immich is much easier thanks for AI assistance with setting it up. If you can live without the built in facial recognition feature you don’t need particularly beefy hardware.
I find myself taking on far more ambitious self hosted projects thanks to Claude. Extending home assistant in various ways, deploying a “self hosted Spotify”, making sure everything is fully accessible via Tailscale out of the range of the wifi and so on. Of course the general population isn’t really aware or interested in most of this.
And it's not to fault Immich, on the contrary, Photos is one of the rare Google property where the team is constantly pushing the envelope.
I could combine it with a bunch of external tools to make do, but it would be crazy clunky or would need full sync with Adobe Cloud for instance for the editing part, while doing all the scanning and categorizing locally.
On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends. It helps me as a research tool, but due to my own restrictions it won't be magic.
Totally understand this part. I didn’t mean to give Claude code full access to locally hosted environments but rather copy back and forth in your local shell with help from Claude (error messages, helping to plan out the installation etc.)
Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.
I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(
I'm not sure what you are seeing, but what I'm seeing is widespread teach illiteracy in Gen Z outside of their smartphone. Gen Z and younger mostly grew up with smartphones as their primary devices and with little contact with a laptop or desktop computer (and even then confined 99% to browser usage).
I can't quite confirm that. My younger siblings' classmates (still high school students, born >=2010, non tech average people) don't give a shit on these topics and behave identical to the Gen X and Y described.
But maybe that was kind of related to times and the place – where I live people needed to be a bit more savvy, so thought like "why you buy an iPhone if Xiaomi can do the same 4x cheaper; if you chose the right model you may even have a good camera too" was popular even in non-tech circles.
But yeah, now that hardware is a bit more of a commodity and such tradeoff might give you a bit more adware with a bit less convenience, maybe it's different. But the next generation's understanding of computer/phone as something else than a magical black box is gone.
Yeah, you’ll need a lot of supporting evidence for this claim. From my personal and professional experience, this doesn’t track. And given how online the younger generations are, it tracks even less. I think there might be a bias towards tech bubbles in that statement.
Also while Imbue is in some sense an AI startup it does have a very different ethos from a lot of tech companies: https://imbue.com/about