I’ve seen a lot of people saying things that amount to “those tech nerds need to understand that nobody wants to use the command line!”, but I don’t actually think that’s the hardest part of self-hosting today. I mean, even with a really slick GUI like ASUSTOR NASes provide, getting a reliable, non-NATed connection, with an SSL certificate, some kind of basic DDOS protection, backups, and working outgoing email (ugh), is a huge pain in the ass.
Am I wrong? Would a Sandstorm-like GUI for deploying Docker images solve all of our problems? What can we do to reshape the network such that people can more easily run their own stuff?
If you’re afraid of the CLI then you probably didn’t be hosting anything complex yourself. The CLI is one of the least complicated parts of server administration.
It’s not the command line that’s hard but the lack of proper documentation and tutorials that makes things hard.
Especially when it’s extremely rare to find documentation that aren’t intended on being too verbose. Documentation with bottom line up front writing style is a rarity.
man <command> is your documentation for the tool itself.
Getting a decent VPS is pretty cheap. Email is the enormous problem. Even if your VPS provider allows outgoing email, your IP address will be flagged and blocked by all mailservers everywhere for the crime of not being Google or Microsoft, or not having a full-time person working 24/7 to satisfy the people in charge of blacklists. You can pay someone else to send your email, but that’s going to cost you as much or more as the VPS you’re using to host your entire app.
the hardest part is doing backups and updates. Repeat after me:
no backup, no pity,
updates neglected, compassion rejected.
Haha, yeah, I totally have proper backups…
Dear Debian users: please also update your Debian version, not just your packages. Like… once a decade would be an improvement for many poor servers.
It’s not even about gui.
If you want to self host you get yourself a pile of software of community-level quality (i.e “it works good until it doesn’t” is the best outcome) you need to care about. This means constantly being involved - updating, maintaining, learning something, etc, and honestly it’s time-consuming even for experienced sysadmins.Do we actually need people afraid of CLIs to host anything? Sounds like a hassle.
The sad truth is that non-techy types will never want to host something themselves unless there’s a reason why doing so is better. I’m not just talking about better the way you and I think of better, either. Nobody really cares about privacy or security or ownership of data. A lot of people like to say those things matter but until it’s as easy to host your own email as signing up for gmail, and doing so provides all the fringe benefits you get with Google, you’re not going to get completely non-technical people self hosting.
You’re right, though. As part of this, there needs to be a way to have an all-in-one package that defaults to enabling the things you’re talking about. There are a lot of plug-n-play methods of self hosting any number of things, but the hard part of hosting is doing it right and securely.
The sad truth is that non-techy types will never want to host something themselves unless there’s a reason why doing so is better.
Not even techy types want it. It’s not a coincidence that SaaS offerings are viable in enterprise contexts. Why build a shit ton of knowledge and drag yourself through the mud of learning tons of different tools if you can as well pay someone who already has all that knowledge. Then you can use the free mental capacity to solve your actual problems.
The only reasons to self host are “paranoia” (no matter if warranted or not) and - which is the important thing for us self-hosters here - curiosity (or rather the drive to learn shit). We basically do it for the sake of doing it.
Technology is complicated. Period. Anything that “seems” simple is in reality extremely complicated underneath the hood. A GUI is nice as long as it works. But if for some reason it doesn’t, you’re shit out of luck.
For NAT and SSL, you don’t need to fiddle with those directly. You can use Wireguard for routing and encryption. For personal use I tend to host my servers as Tor hidden services which gives them routing, encryption, and anonymity. Client side SSL certificates are also something people underestimate here; you can use those for simultaneous encryption and authentication.
Outgoing email can be hard, but since you control the sender and the receiver, you don’t need to go through the public internet’s spam filters. You don’t even necessarily need to use SMTP, you can just drop the files in the maildir and sync that across the systems.
One-click would definitely lower the bar to entry but I have to admit the concept makes me uncomfortable. While it could eliminate those problems, it creates the issue of thousands of new server administrators who really don’t understand the platform that they are now responsible for. Infrastructure and security IS hard because it’s not just about getting the right syntax, it’s understanding the concepts so that not only does it work, it works safely and reliably.
I’ve seen quite a bit of bad troubleshooting going on as newcomers have sought to set up their instances. It doesn’t help that the current docker-compose in the Lemmy repository is outdated and doesn’t work out of the box. More than a few “this worked for me” solutions that I’ve seen may have gotten things working, but broke fundamental security principles that may or may not come back to bite the administrators later.
To be honest, the command line is an important tool, that when you are able to use correctly, will give you a better understanding of a lot of the inner workings of a machine.
The commandine might be intimidating at first, but I personally think not as big of a hurdle to think about replacing it with anything.
Most people that I know that at first were afraid of the command line but tried to get into it, now don’t want to go back. Working with the cli is so efficient that it’s hard to go back to GUI’s.
Edit: don’t get me wrong. I do love a good gui! And I am all for creating usefully GUI’s, also for tech jobs. But I don’t see a point in replacing the job you do in the cli with a GUI.
I’ve been working on getting Matrix Synapse running on my NAS, and the CLI hasn’t been my problem. I’m a programmer, and CLI doesn’t scare me; but the other issues you mention are all new to me, and getting a web service set up so people outside my local network can access it but without leaving me open to bad actors is wicked stressful.
The biggest problems end up being that I need to work with the soup of technologies, and there’s no one place to do all the things. I’ve got TWO routers (because my internet comes through one, and I run my LAN and wifi off one I trust better) which means I’m double-NATed, which is apparently the root of all evil; I can use Cloudflare to tunnel to my NAS, but I can’t accept simple (CNAME) redirects from a family member’s domain to one of my subdomains without paying Cloudflare $200/month, so that means I’m back to dealing with the double-NAT, and then I have to learn setting up TLS, which sounds like it’s simple, but still it’s jimmy way another thing to screw around with and another thing I could screw up on accident.
I could pay for a VPS, but that to me defeats a lot of the point of “host your own” federation when some company could be subpoenaed for copies of all their hosted accounts or something. (Yes, I could get subpoenaed for my data just as easily, but it takes more work to subpoena a thousand people than one company for a thousand people’s accounts.)
Anyway, I’d love to see things evolve to where it’s easy for newbies to host their own private instances of everything.
Personally, I’d love a drop-in tool that runs more like a temporary server while it’s running, syncing federated data you missed while your device was off; and only serving your data when it’s on. Likely with some kind of redirect service/NAT punchthrough so other clients can find you…
…but I think we’re a long way off from being able to do that.
Wow, yeah, that sounds like a really frustrating situation. I wish you all the luck in figuring it out.
YunoHost is a tool which aims to solve the problem of (relatively small scale) self-hosting for people. I use it to host my Mastodon and Lemmy instances and it was very easy. I haven’t dealt with email but that’s also something it supports.
It’s a pretty great platform, although unfortunately it’s currently unable to upgrade Lemmy past 0.16.7 which is a bit of a pain… So it’s hard to recommend it for Lemmy right now.
We need an actual official setup tutorial that is kept up to date. The existing documentation for the Docker setup process is extremely bare-bones, and it doesn’t even link to the right config files. There are some unofficial tutorials out there that are better, but they’re outdated and they link to the wrong config files too.
As I can attest after playing with pfsense for years, GUI or not, if you don’t know what you’re doing you’re going to have a bad time.
For me personally, command line gives me a better understanding of what’s really going on. But then again I’m an old Unix nerd. But once I know what’s going on, I prefer the fancy GUI.
