Running your own servers can be very stressful for reasons I’m not going to get into here. It is very understandable that a lot of people want to steer away from that. At the same time, we need people to take back ownership of the internet.

In short term we have to rule out that they can set up these services by themselves. The digital alphabetism is so low that a significant proportion will struggle with the setup. Me included. That is why it’s so great that we have services like masto.host which does this job for them.

For the most important services, we need self hosting to be as simple as possible. In particular, I think that the peertube project needs a masto.host like service.

  • DBGamer
    12·
    3 years ago

    Sorry if I am the “elephant” in the room here but what exactly is masto.host you speak of? Is this like a Run Cloud/ServerPilot/etc division where you control the servers yourself but they set it on “cruise control” for you? A service firm that hosts such services on your behalf? Or it is like “we’ll give you the tools for you to set it up, but security and maintenance are still your jobs”?

    Aside from that, there are legitimate concerns of lowering the “entry” to such so much. Because aside from providing legit scripts like for Pterodactyl (like here https://github.com/VilhelmPrytz/pterodactyl-installer) to actually facilitates the installation. Because there are legit issues after a “appliance like installation” is done.

    For instance what’s if your virtual/actual disk gets full? Would you know how to diagnose it? Chances are probably not because you were assisted with the setup/operation of service but not the underlying OS/services.

    I actually had that issue with my offsite backup service and THANKFULLY I knew enough to Duck It but not everyone is able to do that (for lack of knowledge/understanding or that they simply can’t do it for one reason or another).

    Thus I believe self hosting should be left to the “pros” and tech savvy “enough” users who can “handle” manning a VPS or have you. And reputable managed providers to do the rest.

    • Vegafjord eoOPM
      2·
      3 years ago

      The idea of https://masto.host/ is that they take care of everything so that you only need to worry about being the admin for your site.

      I recently created a site using masto.host myself and it works great for now.

      • DBGamer
        1·
        3 years ago

        Seems to be something akin to what Matrix offers too. But I don’t like how it’s per user there. $2/mon/user is ridiculous considering that you can probably more than double that density on a quality VPS that isn’t SUPER expensive.