If you ask these people you need to buy expensive hardware and build your own datacenter at home.

I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS.

That's it.

You'll truly be amazed at how much stuff you can actually run on very little hardware if you only have between 2 and 5 users like in a family.

Also, MinIO was always a enterprise option. It was never meant for home use. Just use SeaweedFS, Garage or so if you really want S3.

Sidenote: You do not need S3 in your house. Just use the filesystem.

When choosing software that I run in my “homelab” I lean towards community developed projects first. They may not always have as high quality as the ones offered by commercial entities but they’re just safer for the long term and have no artificial limits (Plex). I used to be a happy Plex customer (I have Plex Pass) but several years ago I had enough of their bullshit, switched to Jellyfin and couldn’t be happier!

1. Peer-to-peer model of decentralization like bittorrent, instead of the client-server model. Local web UIs (like Transmission's web UI) may be served locally (either host-only or LAN-only) as frontend for these apps. Consider this as the 'last-mile connectivity' if you will.

2. Applications are resistant to outages. Obviously, home servers can't be expected to be always online. It may even be running on you regular desktops. But you shouldn't lose the utility of the service just because it goes offline. A great example of this is the email service. They can wait for up to 2 days for the destination server to show up before declaring a delivery failure. Even rejections are handled with retries minutes later.

3. The applications should be able to deal with dynamic IPs and NATs. We will probably need a cryptographic identity mechanism and a way to translate that into a connection to the correct end node. But most of these technologies exist today.

4. E2E encrypted and redundant storage and distribution servers for data that must absolutely be online all the time. Nostr relays seem like a good example.

The Solid and Nostr projects embody many of these ideas already. It just needs a bit more polish to feel natural and intuitive. One way to do it is to have a local daemon that acts as a gateway, cache and web-ui to external data.

Enshittification also usually implies that switching to an alternative is difficult (usually because creating a competing service is near impossible because you'd have to get users on it). That flaw doesn't really apply to self hosting like it does with centralized social media. You can just switch to Jellyfin or Garage or Zulip. Migration might be a pain, but it's doable.

You can't as easily stop using LinkedIn or GitHub or Facebook, etc.

I suspect you don’t. I suspect a couple of beelinks could run your whole business (minus the GPU needs).

yes no more dyndns free accounts... but u can still use afraid or do cf tunnels maybe?

and in some cases nowadays u can get away with

docker-compose up

and some of those things like minio and mattermost are complaints about the free tier or complaints about self hosting? i can't tell

indeed the easiest "self hosting" ever was when ngrok happened.. u could get ur port listening on the internet without a sign up... by just running a single binary without a flag...

Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?

It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.

Oh yes it is. I already self hosted stuff back in 2000 and it was very hard. Then came docker and it is very simple now.

Sure "very simple" mean different things to different people, but if you self host you need to know a lot already.

This is somehiw similar to amateur electronics. You used to do 100% yourself from scratch. Now you have boards and you can start in z much simpler way.

> Even old hardware isn't safe: DDR4 prices are also affected, so that tiny ThinkCentre M720 won't save us.

Most of my home infrastructure is DDR2 or DDR3. It’s plenty fast for quite a lot of things. I really don’t care whether some background operation takes five minutes or an hour. I rather care how little energy and heat that machine produces.

But the biggest thing I am worried about is the hardware prices too.

So I want to ask but is there any hardware (usually ram) which isn't getting its price increase insanely much? Perhaps refurbished or auctioned servers?

What is the best way to now get hardware which is bang for its buck? Should we even buy hardware right now or wait 3-4 years for factory production to rise and AI bubble to crash, I definitely think that ram prices will fall off very steeply (its almost a cycle in the ram business)

I am not sure but buying up small levels of compute feels like a decent idea if you are doing anything computationally expensive and of course if you have something like plex, then I suppose you have to expand on the storage part and not so much on the ram part (perhaps some encoding/decoding which could be ram intensive but I don't know)

I had gotten into the rumour that asus is ramping up chip production or smth to save hardware but it turned out to be fake so not sure how to respond but please some hardware company should definitely see this opportunity smh.

But it does almost seems like there is a squeeze on general purpose computing from all sides, including homelab. The DRAM and SSD prices is just the latest addition to that. There's also Win 11 requiring TPM, which is not an bad thing by itself, but which will almost certainly take away the ability to run arbitrary OSes 5-10 years down the line on PCs. Or you'd still be able to boot them, but nothing will run on it without a fully trusted chain from TPM -> secure boot -> browser.

minimal ~ < $100 hardware (Dell, Acer etc mini or ssf pc)

install your linux distro, use your preferred containers, or just run as services on the os.

There's no ads, no ai, no layer of shite, it can't be "enshittified" unless you're doing the shittifying.

If the source code is available for you to fork, modify, and maintain as you see fit, what's the complaining really about?

Also, forking is an option, you can always use AI to keep it current.

"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."

How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?

The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?

This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?

... not a week later they've announced that they were getting rid of that feature

Then they forced everybody into having us username accounts, change things so I couldn't just visit my media servers address directly.

I also leverage Plex for live TV but they still don't support most OTA HD channels for licensing reasons.

Then they got rid of "watch together" , which has been heavily leveraged by family and friends over the years (re-implementing it is the second highest most requested feature right now in their suggestions).

Now they have the new pricing model where you must have Plex pass or some other subscription service if you want to be able to watch stuff stored on your own media server if you're doing it outside of your local network.

It's getting frustrating and despite people begging for certain things (e.g. Watch together) they seem to just be ignoring what people are asking for and focusing on weird stuff like sharing your watch history with random people or trying to turn Plex into a social media platform.

FWIW: My Intel Nuc on Ubuntu LTS with a cron apt update / upgrade job works for years without a hickup.

I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.

That's probably not how you should interpret it. Self hosting as a whole is still a vastly better option. But if there is a significant enough public movement towards it, you can expect it to be targeted for enshittification too. The incidents related to Plex, MinIO and Mattermost should be taken as warning signals about what this may escalate into in the future. Here are the possible problems I foresee.

1. The situation with Plex, MinIO and Mattermost can be expected to happen more frequently. After a limit, the pain of frequent migration will become untenable. MinIO is a great example. Even the crowd on HN hadn't considered an alternative until then. Some of us learned about Garage, RustFS and Ceph S3 for the first time and we were debating about each of their pros and cons. It's very telling that that discussion was very lengthy.

2. There is a gradual nudge to move everything to the cloud and then monetize it. Mandatory online account for Win11, monetization of GH self-hosted runner (now suspended after backlash, I think) and cloudification of MS Office are good examples. You can expect a similar attempt on self hosted applications. Of course, most of our self-hosted software is currently open source. But if these big companies decide to embrace, extend and extinguish it, I'm not sure that the market will be prudent enough to stick with the FOSS options. Half of HN was fighting me a few days back when I suggested that we should strive to push the market towards serviceable modular hardware.

3. FOSS projects developed under companies are always at a higher risk of being hijacked or going rogue. To be clear, I'm not against that model. For example, I'm happy with Zulip's development and monetization model - ethical, generous and not too pushy. But mattermost shows where that can go wrong. Sure, they're are open source. But there are practical difficulties in easily overriding such issues.

4. At one time, we were expecting small form-factor headless computers (Plug computers [1]) like SheevaPlug and FreedomBox to become ubiquitous. That should still be an option, though I'm not sure where it's headed, given the current RAM situation. But even if they make a come back, it's very likely that OEMs will lock it down like smartphones today and make it difficult for you to exercise your choices of servers, if not outright restrict them. (If anybody wants to argue that normal people will never consider it, remember how smartphones were, before iPhone. We had a blackberry that was used only by a niche crowd.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer

A TinyMiniMicro https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... used PC is more than adequate for most workloads (except for local AI and if you want to have a huge amount of storage). Last time I checked the prices were in the ballpark of $100/$150 for a working machine.

New machines with a N series Intel CPU are in the similar ballpark.

You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.

that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.

People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.

As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.

What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".

Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.

This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.

So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.

Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.