Start doing it

Jokes on you. 🤙🏼

Self-hosting does not fix bugs, make anything easier to use, or necessarily even improve performance. I've got servers and code bases up the whazoo, lately, and shit still don't work. I got my own crap to program. I can't go around fixing everyone else's crap.

You know why you don't realize this? You self-host stuff you barely use, yourself, and that nobody else uses. You're not self-hosting something used by entire groups of people.

"I can't get this to work." "Have you tried self-hosting?" "Yes." "Oh. Okay. Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Y'all's plan for perfectly functioning software.

And like 40 of you will fork or download a code base and tweak it, slightly, so that it actually works, but never submit a PR. 🥴

I've self-hosted Nextcloud for years, and I can say it's been a massive pain in my ass. I lose a piece of my soul every time I update

I self-host email server to be able to manage it actually, I can't trust a 3rd party with it

I self host a few things and it is nice. But simple things on general. I want to expand it, but i am not going to support teams or something as you say

Docker based setups should be a bit easier to replicate?

I had to stop using it. To much stress waiting on it break again, after every update.

I loved self-hosting my email server but at&t, and their shenanigans, made it a nightmare to maintain. I recently moved to purelymail.com real easy to setup and very affordable. Would recommend 🫡

What shenanigans are yoy talking about? If you are referring to their spam filtering, they are pretty responsive at their abuse_rbl email.

Getting off of it is on my to-do list for next year.

No. But I don't push that hard since I, myself, don't yet. 😅

Usually I'm a big believer in self-hosting. But Friday my personal mailserver had a disk failure. Would usually have RAID for redundancy but didn't because its now on a RPi and the usb host copes very poorly with multiple disks (I've tried many things). Not to worry, I have an online backup from last night, right? Wrong. Without boring you with details, I missed an "/" when I updated the backup script recently. I swear I saw it back up each file normally when I ran it manually the first time afterwards, but somehow the nightly backup has clobbered the backup root folder with a symlink. I have an offline backup as well, of course, but its from late June. Imaged and recovered the failed disk, but the folder structure is borked, if I really need a particular email I'll have to grep for it. FML. Two months of emails. Self-hosting is a great plan, but only if you're not a complete doofus like Low Information Voter!

It isn't self-hosting that is the problem. It is the setup and network layer. Do you have complaints about self-hosting solitaire or minesweeper? Of course not! They install without configuration and just work. I'd counter with give me a protocol that doesn't require configuration of any apps that use it. I don't want to pay for hosted services, not out of unwillingness to pay, but because that means I have configure something. Try telling people that they can have a great video-editing program and here are 14 companies they can pay to use it each with slightly different versions and pros and cons, but at least they are mostly interoperable. #nostrsucks

That being said #nostr is a great start. It just has a very long way to go.

"My system is so well-designed that you need docker, for it to work." -- No competent engineer, ever.

Solitaire and mindsweeper are incapsulated, not designed for multi-player use. Nostr is more akin to e-mail, but I should only have to set it up once, on each device.

No. There is no logical reason that you should have to set it up once for each device once the devices share an identity. I used non-networking examples to show what the ideal experience is because our networking sucks. IP is fine, but everything downstream of that is suspect because things keep gravitating back into silos because of spam. The only resilient form of communication is in person conversation. So far. We can and must be able to piggy-back off that. Once we stop accepting that networking has to suck, we can start building applications that ordinary people can use.

You probably mean "you need docker to self host it". The only way to guarantee consistent behavior of software across different devices is if they all share the same base environment. If this can be achieved by any other means great. It is one of the solutions to "it works on my computer problem". Most home server solutions (start9,umbrel etc) are built around this. Doesn't matter if it is well designed if it can only run on the Creator's system.

Honestly I think that's starting to become most projects now. The only reason node project's are usually supported outside of containers is because it's all monoglot. npm run x. That and fucking environment variables for configuration. It really bothers me.

From my Simple-Bookmark app readme "Simple-bookmark was built bare-metal as the primary target, this is because I believe users should have the support to deploy open source apps easily outside of a container. So while a container deployment is an option, the container is actually built from the Linux-x64 package during CI build time."

Well, you can have application data in an event, but the clients I use neglect that. Also, no sharing between clients because they all assume we only use their client on one device. 🤷‍♀️

I see the point you're making, but I'd argue it's pretty BS irl. I build pretty large polyglot (C, C++, C#, TS) server applications that are designed to be deployed on bare metal with minimal setup. The complexity is not there, and even C applications, which generally don't have build tools or package managers like most other languages, still isn't all that complex to deploy IMO.