Hi all, I’ve been noticing a pattern in self-hosting communities, and I’m curious if others see it too.
Whenever someone asks for a more beginner-friendly solution, something with a UI, automated setup, or fewer manual configs, there’s often a response like:
“If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
Sometimes it feels like a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technical side of self-hosting. I enjoy tinkering, breaking things, fixing them, learning along the way. That’s how most of us got into it.
But here’s the question: Is gatekeeping slowing down the adoption of self-hosting?
If we want more people to own their data, escape Big Tech, and embrace open-source alternatives, shouldn’t we welcome solutions that lower the entry barrier?
There’s room for everyone:
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people who want full control and custom setups,
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people who want semi-manual but guided,
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and people who want it to work with minimal friction.
Just like not every Linux user compiles from source, but they’re still Linux users.
Where do you stand? Should self-hosting stay DIY-only or is there value in easier, more accessible ways to self-host?
My project focuses on building a tool that makes self-hosting more accessible without sacrificing data ownership, so I genuinely want your honest take before releasing it more widely.
“Has anyone noticed that medical doctors gate-keep people doing open heart surgery?”
Why do you assume self-hosting is and can be trivial? It is NOT for everybody. You should have some base level of technical knowledge. You should expect to need to learn some things. It’s not a badge of honor, it’s experience.
Good luck with that. Don’t get your users pwned in the process. You’re now responsible for the security of people who think “opening a command line” is too difficult.
Self-hosting is trivial and everyone can do it.
Exposing services to the internet is not.
Just like everyone doing open heart surgery on dummies is fine, everyone self-hosting in their own network is fine. You can buy hardware right now that connects to power and wifi and you are self-hosting.
So is open heart surgery. Unless you want it to end successfully.
I wouldn’t equate installing proxmox on an old pc to open heart surgery. It’s pretty basic stuff and you can follow guides on how to install services in a container or vm. People are interested in things like pihole, home assistant, arr stacks, nas, and better control over their network. It’s definitely not rocket surgery.
The users who are being talked about here probably don’t get that exposing your machine to the Internet carries risk. That’s the point.
There is literally a thread somewhere on my Lemmy I need to try and find just recently that shows this perfectly. Someone made a thread asking how they can self host their images for backup from their phone and naturally everyone pointed them to immich. And they immediately started complaining and bitching that they could not access it from outside their local network. Instead of asking how to fix that they were like what the hell is the point if I have to be on the same Wi-Fi this is stupid. And they basically did not want to engage with the people being like hey you need to either make a reverse proxy or open a port on your router. They should not be self hosting
Yep, that sounds like the poster child for this phenomenon.
Using wireguard to VPN into your home network is mostly trivial (using tailscale to do so is actually trivial, for my usage of the word, but introduces an untrusted company into the mix), opening your local network to the outernet is not, expect pain.
I do not agree
Yes, it sometimes can be difficult and frustrating, but so long as someone, anyone, is willing to try and learn and fail and retry, they can get my help
Have you forgotten that you too started at 0?
Not at all. In fact I remember the day my server was hacked because I’d left a service running that had a vulnerability in it. I remember changing passwords, calling my bank to ensure there had been no fraudulent charges, etc. I remember “war driving” to find vulnerable WiFi networks. I remember changing default passwords on a service setup by a client of mine.
As I said - it’s not gate-keeping it’s experience.
Teaching is “gate-keeping” apparently. You can’t tell somebody that they need to learn something! You just need to give them a link to a url and say “run this thing as root and your stuff will work - totally not a scam tho”.
Was this server on an internal network?