The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?
The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?
Tired of relying on Big Tech to enable collaboration, peer-to-peer enthusiasts are creating a new model that cuts out the middleman. (That’s you, Google.)
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Use open-source software! Do not rely on "someone else's computer". Build your own locally hosted cloud! If you can use open-source hardware when doing so: awesome. If not, make at least sure that everything needed to run the system is open.
Build your own locally hosted cloud!
This is the hard part to sell people. I feel like for self-hosting to become popular, there would need to be a "plug 'n' play" device that essentially has everything you need to set up a small server on your home network. If you could set up a home server as easily as you can set up a Google Home device, that would be amazing.
I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It's not quite plug and play but at it's best it's quite within the realm of someone who's got some computer skills. At it's worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it's not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don't want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.
“Quite within the realm of someone who's got some computer skills” means “inaccessible to most people”. I don’t mean to sound like an ass about it, but most people just don’t care enough about this stuff to invest even a bit of time in it (nevermind the upfront cost for a Synology or Qnap NAS).
Sure - but you've got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren't experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who's a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.
I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who's used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.
Certainly it's somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I'm sure in my house we're dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.
Setting it up is one thing, there is also the need to maintain it. If something breaks in the cloud, there are people dedicated to fixing it. That’s the hard part to convince people to.
Realistically, the best solution is hosted and managed versions of FOSS apps where the private data is encrypted. Most people just don’t want to manage a server, and this solution would provide funding to FOSS projects while also increasing data sovereignty for non-self hosters.
As much as we all might want it to, self hosting will never be mainstream.
I wonder what the market would be for such a solution. Make a custom raspberry pi like small server that has a self hosted website with a decent UI to setup most solutions like email, nas, pihole, and maybe a media server. Sell the easy setup to those who can't be bothered, while still being open source and promoting Foss alternatives. I'm sure you could even sell different server tiers for power users as well who don't want to be bothered with it. Then you could always sell a security service in a sense that will have people at the organization maintaining and updating the packages on the server os for that identified hardware. Then anyone who is inclined could set this up on their own so long as they have the skills to maintain their security, otherwise for basically the same cost as most subscriptions you could be able to self host email, Nas, media and an ad blocker network wide. As long as the ui experience setting this up is just as polished as simple as setting up a Gmail account I feel like this could do pretty well.
Think about how many people have a Synology NAS; it’s close to what you’re describing, but it’s still a relatively niche product. People simply don’t care enough. What you’re describing could definitely work, but only once people start caring about this.
Sure, a local backup is great but unsafe considering your homelab is still in the same geographic area as the things you're backing up. In the event of ecological disasters (local or other), storing all data locally is keeping your eggs in one basket. Idk much about cryptomater (or other such software) but encrypted automatic backups sounds perfect.