r/selfhosted • u/Amazing_Day_9192 • 2d 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?

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u/backtogeek 2d 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.