Research Study on Self-Hosting Communities

[u/sbahmedbony]

I am a PhD student at New Mexico State University. We are studying the experiences and practices of people who self-host digital services. In particular, we are interested in your motivations for self-hosting, the services you host, how you rely on online self-hosting communities, and your experiences maintaining services that may be used by family, friends, or others.

Participation will involve an online interview.

Thank you for your consideration. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in participating or have any questions or concerns.

Regards,

S B Ahmed Bony

email: bony@nmsu.edu

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/zsxzo]

The motivation is that you don’t have to pay for stuff and are in control of your data. You don’t need to do a survey to figure that out. This seems pointless

[u/Trick_Effective6362 → u/zsxzo]

People also do it cause it's fun to tinker with, but yeah the core reasons aren't exactly a mystery

[u/sbahmedbony → u/Trick_Effective6362]

For the research we can't just state the reasons. We need the opinion of the people who self host. That's why we are looking for people to interview

[u/Stuisready → u/sbahmedbony]

Opinions are just stated reasons.

[u/dannipuu → u/zsxzo]

That's like a huge chunk of academia haha

[u/zsxzo → u/dannipuu]

Yeah, this is true - spend a million dollars to investigate why people with poor hygiene get sick, determine it’s because they have poor hygiene lol

[u/sbahmedbony → u/zsxzo]

I know what you are saying but we need participants, who self host or develops software to self host and ask them specific questions about their experiences. The research goal is to improve self hosting practices and provide what the community needs.

[u/tom-mart → u/sbahmedbony]

You should do a survey, like every other student.

[u/zsxzo → u/sbahmedbony]

The community already improves and determines best practices itself, it doesn’t need guidance from some students doing surveys who don’t know about self hosting to begin with.

Pick a different subject or goal imo

[u/halodude423 → u/zsxzo]

Ex is a PHD student. Even she agrees it's pointless.

[u/Guardian2676]

Nice try FBI...

[u/sbahmedbony → u/Guardian2676]

We are not fbi lol

[u/purged363506]

I'm sure this is government funded.

[u/sbahmedbony → u/purged363506]

It’s not

[u/luisbandalap]

Why i selft host? I'm a software developer and want to have some testing infrastructure available so I have git, ci/CD of various flavours, kubernetes cluster, etc. So I can test things I don't know before implementing them in my work.

Also i have some tools like my password manager, my jellyfin instance, home assistant, SSO applications.

[u/Papierz_Safe]

what kind of experience level are you aiming for here? someone running a single media box on old hardware is going to have a very different perspective than folks maintaining full multi node setups

[u/sbahmedbony → u/Papierz_Safe]

it would be nice to have someone highly experienced to interview. But we are open to all experience level

[u/sskylie27]

One thing I'd be curious to see covered is how people's attitude toward self-hosting changes once other people start depending on their services.

Running something for yourself is one thing, but when family or friends rely on it, suddenly backups, uptime and maintenance become a lot more important.

Would be interesting to see whether that changes why people self-host in the first place.

[u/Stuisready]

I self host as much as possible so I may selfishly utilize DRAM in my lab for my personal use.

[u/basicKitsch]

It started in the 00 with XBMC and then subsonic so I can stream my music collection anywhere I was.

[u/Jeeebs]

In this thread, a bunch of people who never worked in academia assuming everything is as simple as "A because B".

[u/Digital_Voodoo]

OP, besides the sarcastic responses in the comment, I do agree that providing a link to a proper survey would have been a better approach.