What are the most promising projects/services aiming at making self hosting easier for everyone?
Definitely yunohost for me
CasaOS is pretty noob-friendly
How is it in terms of privacy?
completely foss afaik
I have never used it but from the website I gather that it’s an app (literally, there’s a mobile app) which enables you to remotely set up a VPS with a set of services at generic VPS hosting providers like Hetzner or DigitalOcean with the click of a few buttons.
It builds on NixOS which naturally lends itself to abstraction. They have created a pre-made NixOS configuration which configures these services to sensible defaults and provides a few highly abstract options which the user must set themselves. “Enable service xyz”, “Enable backups for services a, b, and c”.
I assume these are set using a UI; producing a JSON like this. All the generic NixOS config then needs to do is simply consumes the JSON and set the internal options accordingly. But the user doesn’t need to care about any of that, the experienced people who maintain this NixOS config do it for them.I don’t know how well it works currently but I absolutely see and love the vision. Imagine being able to deploy all the cloud services you need on your own VPS by creating a few accounts, copy pasting API tokens and then simply tapping sliders and buttons in a mobile app. I can absolutely see that becoming suitable for the masses.
Other comments already pointed to some very good software solutions.
But I would argue that absolutely the biggest barrier to entry for the masses is hardware.
Restoring an old PC or making some cable spaghetti with some SBC is currently too advanced for average person.
Self-hosting for the masses would require some new form of home servers.
Something modular, where adding new components would be as easy as playing with Lego bricks.Projects like Freedom Box were attempting this 10+ years ago, or even simpler, a home server that basically sits on your powerplug. AFAIK it sort of petered out fast, at least in the public mind, and I think it’s a shame. It had potential and was even more basic than the Lego approach.
I don’t use Umbrel, but it’s basically a GUI for installing Docker apps from what I can tell and looks promising.
Seems pushing a crypto agenda.
Hosting a Bitcoin node is literally the last thing I would host. Almost 600 gb of garbage transactions so you can check the 500 bytes of your own transactions without relying on external services?
Seems pushing a crypto agenda.
Most definitely, they’re not shy about that. A Bitcoin node used to be installed by default since that was their users’ main goal and the point of the project, but as their self-hosted app list grew they made all the crypto apps optional. It doesn’t bother me having the option so long as it isn’t forced (I don’t own Bitcoin). I just look for the biggest app store, which is why I’m rolling vanilla Arch and Docker Compose instead of a project like Umbrel for now.
My favorite has been Sandstorm.io ever since I discovered it. Sure, it doesn’t look as pretty as the others, but it’s super easy if you use one of their free hostnames.
Yunohost for me as well. My only prior self-hosting experience was installing Nextcloudpi images for raspberry pi, and it was a similar experience once I knew how to forward ports on my router etc.
It even automatically set up an email server and XMPP server by default. I don’t use XMPP and hadn’t planned on hosting my own email, but, here I am. Installing apps feels like using a mobile app store. Hosting nextcloud, freshRSS, static blog, WordPress, listmonk, wallabag, other stuff on a small ARM SBC, with plenty of resources left.
I don’t even really know how it works 😅 but I contribute on Liberapay and try to keep good backups and only install well-rated apps.
This is very close to what I’m looking for. I really liked the app store part. I’ll surely give it a try.
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FTP
