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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. Agree but kinda the inverse of your takeaway.
I prefer to skip the gui when I know what’s going on. It’s just a waste of resources in many cases and sometimes obfuscates options that otherwise are there.
For example on my opnsense box the NUT package doesn’t work in the gui. Never has. But I have setup an innumerable number of nut instances with that same ups. I did it via the cli and it works, even when the gui says not possible.
