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?
the hardest part is doing backups and updates. Repeat after me:
no backup, no pity,
updates neglected, compassion rejected.
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.
Haha, yeah, I totally have proper backups…
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.
It’s actually rare these days that mail from my personal server (on a Linode/Akamai IP) is rejected, and I don’t even have DMARC set up, only SPF and DKIM. I just use my old gmail address as a backup for those rare situations.
Something like Zoho is only $12 a year per hosted email address.
How many outgoing emails are we talking about? Because there are a lot of free or cheap options for personal use and small businesses.
Do we actually need people afraid of CLIs to host anything? Sounds like a hassle.
Look at installing Gentoo, or Arch, or Alpine vs Ubuntu. There’s no technical reason we can’t make Gentoo installation GUI. It’s just going to be very very tedious. Orders of magnitude more tedious.
At the same time Gentoo allows you to customize WAAAAY more things during its install than Ubuntu.
So specifically for lemmy - yeah we can probably make some sort of default AWS image where you just select it when spinning up new VM and you’re up and running. But what if you want something slightly different? Maybe you prefer MySQL instead of Postgres. Or Apache instead of nginx, or maybe you want images hosted on a different machine. Suddenly it’s the install GUI author’s responsibility to support install of 10 different databases, or load-balancers, or something else, and each one has their own GUI options. Then someone else wants 11th database added and it has 10 more custom options…. Oh and now someone else is asking for a DigitalOcean image instead… or and now someone’s asking for Docker image… You see where this is going.
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.I don’t really have patience for people’s willful ignorance. The command line isn’t hard, you’re just dumb. (edit: Not “you” specifically.)
As 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.
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.
That’s true. Though I would sub paranoia with control.
I self host things because I want control. I want to be in control of when it gets updates and goes down. I want to be in control of how to fix it when it breaks. I want to be in control of my account and whether it’s backed up etc.
I thought of that as well but concluded that this is also some kind of paranoia. The SaaS providers promise you availability, security etc, but we don’t believe them and want that in our own hands. So IMO we only want to be in control, because we fear we could suddenly lose access or get betrayed. Which is a specific manifestation of paronia.
Fair point.
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.
One-click would definitely lower the bar to entry but I have to admit the concept makes me uncomfortable. While it cloud eliminate those problem it creates the issue of creating thousands of 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.
I would say specifically the hardest part for self hosting is the grok’ing of how SSL works and setting it up right with automatic renewal.
There’s a lot of extra steps involved often.
Id also say understanding how routing works and why you need a reverse proxy is the other big one.
So you want non-technical people to set up botnet members?
There’s this thing called ‘money’ which people who can’t do a thing give other people who can do the thing well to make them do the thing.
This seems unnecessarily snarky.
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.
