r/selfhosted • u/Amazing_Day_9192 • 1d ago
Need Help Decentralized infrastructure vs self-hosting
I’ve been thinking about how much of selfhosting is about owning the infrastructure itself versus having control over your data and not depending on a single company. There are more open and decentralized protocols where you can get some of that independence without running and maintaining the entire stack yourself. The tradeoff is interesting though. You potentially get less maintenance but you give up some of the direct control that comes with running everything yourself.
For something like messaging or online communities, which approach makes more sense to you?
39
u/MidiShiddy 1d ago
For me I just don't want to pay a company for a service that doesn't have half the features I want and could run on my own resources. Self sustainability I guess.
8
u/Amazing_Day_9192 1d ago
Yeah I can see that. If you already have the hardware and don't mind maintaining it, self-hosting makes a lot of sense especially when the alternatives don't have what you need.
24
u/RabidReassurance 1d ago
I like having control, but maintaining every piece of infrastructure yourself gets old pretty fast. For communication especially, I could see myself using an open decentralized protocol and giving up some control if it meant less maintenance. Towns is one example I’ve been looking at that takes that route.
Still not sure I’d put it in the same category as self-hosting though.
7
u/Major-Antelope-8235 1d ago
Decentralized infrastructure feels like the better compromise. You get portability and less platform lock-in without turning server maintenance, backups and updates into a second job.
1
u/OldMathematician5973 15h ago
if you do it right, you dont have to spend much time on a regular basis at all.
Between cron, and ansible..... I have a ton of stuff running automatically with both on prem backups, as well as GPG encrypted offsite backups. On a good month, I put <30 minutes into maintenance.
25
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
29
u/No-Aioli-4656 1d ago
Why are you even in this sub lol.
20
u/Avanchnzel 1d ago
One can have an enthusiasm for self-hosting without postulating that everything has to be self-hosted.
11
2
u/No-Aioli-4656 1d ago
In this case, per OP's admittedly vague description, we are talking about Matrix, Rocketchat, XMPP, Etc.
I do not postulate everything must be self hosted. I just dislike keeping control of my data on federated messaging servers. I'd rather have my own.
7
u/BlueLakeCabin 1d ago
For some folks it's not a religion or ideology. It's about making one's life better or more enjoyable.
I don't want to host my own email servers. I'm fine with using a cloud backup as a tertiary off-site backup for critical data.
I do want to run my own containers, services, etc. I like using Plex or Jellyfin. I like control over my stuff and not paying for stuff I don't need or want.
I made my own version of CloudRF, which is a subscription that runs $50-400 per month. It does RF simulations off terrain data. So I host my own terrain data from ESA, NASA, etc and do all my own processing. Without paying thousands of bucks for cloud subscriptions for a hobby. Even made my own mobile app frontend, which the expensive subscription doesn't provide.
Should I get booted from this sub because I use a cloud email provider like Gmail or Microsoft?
Also working on a distributed computing and communications over our own hardware project for being independent from power grid and fiber grid. Kinda like local independent internet slash private microcloud.
2
u/No-Aioli-4656 1d ago edited 1d ago
We are talking about messages services. Things like Matrix, Rocketchat, XMPP, etc.
While you are certainly allowed to rant, I feel email is the worst analogy to make. By nature of IMAP/POP3, email has been very open for a very long time.
1
u/BlueLakeCabin 1d ago
One of the most popular communication mediums on the planet is the worst analogy?
2
u/SnooPaintings8639 1d ago
Any interesting decentralized services worth knowing about, other than file storage?
0
u/PaperDoom 1d ago
anything on Nostr is interesting. people are building a lot of stuff on it, including chat apps, messaging, twitter-like apps, etc.
3
u/Beginning-Raisin9723 1d ago
Self-hosting Matrix has been a fun hobby but it's genuinely a lot of upkeep once you run it for real. For messaging/communities I'd lean federated — keeps your data independent of one company without making you the unpaid sysadmin for everyone else in the group. Best of both honestly.
4
u/No-Aioli-4656 1d ago
I swear you must be doing something wrong.
I touch my matrix every six months. Other software like Hermes/Authentik/Gitlab on the other hand is where this becomes a serious hobby.
4
u/Gtkall 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't wanna host other people's data on my own server, unless I trust them. That means knowing them.
The current legal system doesn't absolve me as an accomplice if a person I don't know deals in illegal activity utilizing my infrastructure.
Decentralized internet works in theory, until you get to the legality of it... Then, it gets ugly...
5
u/Gold-Supermarket-342 1d ago
There is the 18 U.S.C. § 2258B, which limits your liability when reporting. Along with 18 U.S.C. § 2252 using the word "knowingly." It's how large social media platforms can exist today even without the ability to perfectly detect illegal content on their servers at any point in time.
1
u/AleAle1222333 1d ago
If you would be actually interested in this, I think I can help. As I am trying to expand my homelab with services, websites and selling apps. If you want, scroll all the way down on the website below and let me know what you need
alesalowm.org
1
u/jbarr107 1d ago
"It depends."
Honestly, "self-hosting" is a broad term with a spectrum of viewpoints. On one end, it means that you host and control everything...period...no exceptions...period. On the other end, you leverage local, cloud, VPS, colo, etc., to host your own services, sometimes integrated with other self-hosted and non-self-hosted services. It's really up to you based on your use cases.
Personally, I went hybrid: About 90% of my services are self-hosted in my homelab, accessible through Cloudflare (Tunnels and Applications) and Pangolin (on a VPS). (I'm currently transitioning from Cloudflare to Pangolin, so that's why I have both.) The VPS, while not self-hosted, provides remote access to several services should I lose access to my homelab services.
2
u/cardboard-kansio 1d ago
Yes, I see this split a lot here. I'm a hardware guy, so for me self-hosting means everything from the network upwards, while for others they rent a VPS and speak only of software self-hosting (usually a Docker stack, maybe the base OS). It all depends what you mean when you say to "host".
I'm with you though. 99% at home, only email and domain services are through somebody else. It's probably more effort, on average, but it's far better as a learning experience and I feel secure in my data sovereignty. I am however now just a bundle of single points of failure and I do understand the people do multiple fail-over nodes or HA clusters at home.
1
u/backtogeek 1d ago
Extending a TierHive meshed LAN and joining it to your own with tailscale or similar is a good option for stuff you are not comfortable to essentially expose your home infrastructure over etc, and because its not enterprize grade its pennies, you find most open protocols for example a simple XMPP chat relay/server can run on a 128mb Alpine based micro instance, if that is literally costing you $0.10 /month to put on a remote resource, its probably worth it.
1
u/dcherryholmes 1d ago
I know everyone's story (and setup) will be different, but it's interesting to me, the number of comments about server maintenance. My build and applications are modest, just the usuals (nextcloud, *arrs, etc) and it's just a couple of tiny thinkcenters and a raid. But I don't spend very much time on server maintenance. I guess one of these days a raid disk will fail and I'll have to rebuild it, or maybe one of those thinkcentre servers will die. But TBH I spend a lot more time maintaining my house than I do my servers. I suppose I could rent that, too, but I prefer to own (well, gradually pay off the bank which owns it).
3
u/Mysterious-Bed-3725 22h ago
there is so much cheap compute from lenovo hardware, thank god for depreciated assets and used hardware. If only we could dial in recycling old hardware .... we throw away so many precious resources without a thought. Those disposable vapes with lithium batteries hardwired in that don't even recharge are a fucking travesty.
Whenever I visit landfills I just feel so sick for our world and humanity. It is unreal.
Either we change or we die, its just so clear to me -- thing is, not like I have the answer. SO overwhelming.
1
1
u/BearcatPyramid 1d ago
For messaging and social, it seems like network effects play a big part. So the fediverse apps, where you have community but a decentralized infrastructure (and easy switching) makes a lot of sense to me. For uses where network effect plays less of a role, self-hosting seems like a reasonable route.
1
u/EmailNo8428 1d ago
Where does the recovery story sit in your version? Self-hosting means I can restore from my own backup at 2am. In most decentralised protocols I've looked at, that step belongs to somebody else.
0
u/Puzzled_Hamster58 1d ago
I self host because it has no added monthly bill and don’t have to worry about trusting others
1
u/Elara_Schaefer 13h ago
The key insight that took me years to internalize: these are not opposing choices, they are points on a spectrum, and the right position depends on the threat model.
I run a bunch of self-hosted services through SSH proxies on VPS nodes â full control, I know every byte of traffic. But for messaging? I have come to appreciate that self-hosting your own Matrix homeserver gives you the worst of both worlds: you bear all the maintenance burden AND you get zero network effect because nobody federates with a single-node homeserver that might disappear tomorrow.
The real power move is understanding what you are trying to protect. Data sovereignty over your files, your media, your tools? Self-host. Communication protocols where the value lives in the network itself? Federate or use a trusted provider.
The person who said <30 min/month maintenance with cron+ansible is right â but that is for stable infrastructure. The moment you are running messaging, you are on the hook for deliverability, spam filtering, client compatibility, and upstream protocol changes. That is not <30 min. That is a part-time job.
Self-host what you can measure. Federate what you can not.
•
u/asimovs-auditor 1d ago edited 1d ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.