Hi all, I’ve been noticing a pattern in self-hosting communities, and I’m curious if others see it too.
Whenever someone asks for a more beginner-friendly solution, something with a UI, automated setup, or fewer manual configs, there’s often a response like:
“If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
Sometimes it feels like a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technical side of self-hosting. I enjoy tinkering, breaking things, fixing them, learning along the way. That’s how most of us got into it.
But here’s the question: Is gatekeeping slowing down the adoption of self-hosting?
If we want more people to own their data, escape Big Tech, and embrace open-source alternatives, shouldn’t we welcome solutions that lower the entry barrier?
There’s room for everyone:
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people who want full control and custom setups,
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people who want semi-manual but guided,
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and people who want it to work with minimal friction.
Just like not every Linux user compiles from source, but they’re still Linux users.
Where do you stand? Should self-hosting stay DIY-only or is there value in easier, more accessible ways to self-host?
My project focuses on building a tool that makes self-hosting more accessible without sacrificing data ownership, so I genuinely want your honest take before releasing it more widely.
A part of it is concern.
System administration on a system you’re planning to use remotely over the internet must be done right. Not being sure what you’re doing is how we all learn, but you really should be sure before exposing yourself to the internet.
It’s not like experimenting with linux on a laptop. Self-hosting is usually about providing some sort of service for yourself, which if accessed by someone malicious, can be used to really hurt you.
Just wanna add here that it is not just hurt in terms of time, money or loss of data(those are a given). It could even land you in legal trouble that you can not explain your way out of in some extreme circumstances.
I’ve been in tech a long time and don’t allow WAN ingress into my network at all because I don’t have time to properly harden my self-hosted services. For absolute beginners, I wouldn’t recommend making anything public until they’re more experienced. Just running Jellyfin for you and your family on an old laptop is a perfect starter project.
I make it simple for myself - only WAN ingress into my network is openvpn protected by both username, password and client certificate files.
Same. No WAN ingress without VPN.
See, no big deal if somebody else comes into your system. You’ll be happier.