Published 2025-08-14
Drew Lyton wrote a blog post titled “The Future is NOT Self-Hosted” and while I can agree with some of what he says, his premise is flawed and the conclusion is off-the-mark.
Let’s start with the argument’s foundation.
Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet’s inception. Purchased digital goods have always been licenses more than owned assets.
It’s not hard to accept that between streaming, DRM, and (regional) lock-in for devices, companies and “license holders” have their entire business plan hinging on the fact that consumers do not own the product. “Subscriptions” makes Wall Street happy even though it doesn’t make sense for most products and solutions.
No argument with Drew here.
Self-hosting is when you have a computer in your house do those same things [as Cloud providers], but on a much smaller scale. You maintain the hardware. You set up the servers. You manage the applications. You store and backup your data. You troubleshoot issues when things (inevitably) go wrong.
If that sounds like a lot of work, it is.
This is where I start to call bullshit. Yes, the idea is that you run services that replicate the function of what you need.
The key word there is need.
Do you need a live-editing collaborative document system where you and N-number of other people are actively updating a single document? Probably not. It is neat to have two people concurrently editing a document but it is absolutely not required to have a useful, multi-user editing experience. If you really do need concurrently collaborative editing, there’s always etherpad or multiple “Google Drive”-like options literally designed for self-hosting-scale.
The same could be said for having a “hosted streaming platform.” Streaming of media is a matter of downloading data to the device but preventing the user from accessing or saving the already-downloaded copy of the data. When you use a client that permits turning your “stream” into a persistent file (like yt-dlp), all that “streaming” turns immediately into downloads you can replay or share to your heart’s content.
If you shift your thinking such that your device will get a download of the data, then what you’re looking for is a library or catalog manager, not a live streaming and/or transcoding platform.
(If this sounds familiar, that’s because we have had good, polished, workable solutions to the above problems since the 2000s.)
This section just… feels designed to overwhelm the reader with unnecessary complexity.
That’s kind of the point. All of that took 138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do.
Okay, bro. Way to make your point by sounding scary. You can also buy a synology NAS (or this one) with plenty of CPU and storage to do the job you had to cobble machine parts together to do.
But in the end, I had four open-source alternatives to popular cloud-based apps running on my home server:
And now we get to the point: run a couple of applications on a network-storage-capable computer and you have a pretty good approximation of what you spend between zero-and-thirty USD a month to have from Apple/Google/Microsoft/Netflix/Paramount/etc.
To add to the evidence, here’s what the author said on the ycombinator thread for his post (full thread here):
Yeah, at one point in writing this article I had a brief aside about more “off-the-shelf”, accessible solutions to self-hosting like Synology. But I cut it because I honestly don’t think they make the process that much easier. They help with hardware, but the software setup I think is still pretty difficult. Thanks for reading!
Your entire point is to bias folks against self-hosting so you can make your next point which is…
Right now, I’m self-hosting a private Google Photos alternative. It’s fully owned and only accessible to me and my wife.
So, how do I create a shared photo album with my friends where we can all upload pictures from our latest trip?
[. . .] without exposing our services to the public internet and forcing our friends to signup for our weird app
You… expose the services to the internet and you set up accounts for your friends and family. This part is not hard. The solution is right there in front of you. Maybe you’re hesitant because you serve your stuff over plain HTTP (as evidenced by your screenshots) but we have Let’sEncrypt, so… why?
But okay, your point is that you want us to think sharing like this is hard…
But just like the suburbs, this vision is incredibly inefficient and detrimental to creating vibrant, interconnected communities. It necessitates mass amounts of duplicate, unused infrastructure and requires each household to be individually responsible for maintaining that infrastructure. It silos us and makes it harder to share resources.
And what do we get in return? A worse experience than cloud-based services.
This is just exasperating. You’re not “duplicating infrastructure,” you’re establishing infrastructure for you and those who you can support. You have the capability and capacity to set something up for you and your immediate family. What would happen if you offered hosting to your friends and broader family?
And, again, it’s really not duplicating infrastructure to have a storage-box for your data. That’s like saying “the county and the IRS have all my important records, so I’m not going to get a file cabinet (for my important documents).”
At some point, everyone is required to manage their irreplaceable document “stuff.” Those with a permanent address will do things like buy a safe or filing cabinet and cart it around every time they move. That’s the equivalent of the digital self-hosting solution. Nobody says they’re “wasting space” or “duplicating infrastructure” – it’s seen as a smart investment to avoid catastrophic loss.
Those who don’t have a permanent home address seek out alternative solutions:
These are well-known solutions to RV-ers and Van-lifers without a permanent address. We’ve had these solutions for decades and they work pretty well. What you have built right now is a really good “fire-proof safe”-equivalent as option-1 for your friends and family.
It empowers individuals, but it doesn’t reject the power dynamic itself. It creates a system where everyone has to provide for themselves instead of a system that provides for everyone.
Comically missing the point.
But if we want to live in a world where we are not bent at the knee to corporate lords and also don’t fall victim to the myth of self-reliance and rugged individualism, we need to think radically differently about how we create communal, shared internet infrastructure.
Uh… wow, you keep leaning into that false dilemma (perpetuated by corporate interests) that there are only two outcomes here… what’s your angle?
Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations.
I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
. . .
The devil is in the details. But I know this world where we are all free from our corporate landlords through solidarity, mutual aid, and shared, community-owned, privacy-focused, internet infrastructure is possible.
. . .
“How do I build my own cloud?” is the question that inspired this journey. But, “How do we build a better cloud?” is the one that I’m left wondering as it comes to an end.
Comically missing the point, part 2.
You’re literally employee number one of your future Co-Op, owning this infrastructure. You went far enough to mostly solve your own problem – why not take the last step and start truly sharing?
Drew staked out a position on something that got everyone talking about it. If this is a false-flag operation, then, applause - what a success.
Ultimately, yes, I agree - I’d love to have municipalities and governments provide “public cloud” like infrastructure. I think that’s a viable way forward for a lot of “bigger” issues that governments are currently paying large sums of money to private entities for.
That said, Drew specifically points out that his proposed communal system needs to work together with private systems:
Even with this technical solution, I think it makes sense to envision a world with private, market-provided options.
My friend, I’ll say it again: that is you. Be the change you seek in the world. Provide services and leverage open protocols (like ActivityPub, IMAP/SMTP, RSS, etc) so that your customers aren’t locked-in to your solutions. If you have the skills and the desire, you start up the co-op and build the solution.
Self-hosting is the start of this entire municipal / co-op owned infrastructure you’re hoping for… you’re just so focused on yourself and the false-dilemma of trying to provide “cloud like” solutions that you can’t see it.