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.

If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting

Yes, absolutely.

Configure Docker

if you cannot run docker compose up or understand the basics of what it’s doing, you should not be self hosting. Yes, Docker can be difficult to troubleshoot but you need to understand where your data is being stored and generally self hosting projects using Docker are easy to set up.

reverse proxies

Implying exposing your server to the Internet. Yes. 100%. If you do not know what you’re doing, you should not. This is dangerous to your machine and to your data.

Yaml files

This is a plain text file. You can open it with Notepad or your operating system’s equivalent. Editing a text file to enter some default parameters is a low bar and if you can’t edit a text file, you’re going to get caught up in some other part of self hosting

You’re confusing a lack of handholding with gatekeeping.

beginner friendly solution, something with a UI, fewer manual configs…

First, you’re not entirely right. you can get a ton of self hosting done with things like Synology or Home assistant, and never see the complexity. You might get owned by a botnet, but it “works.”

Self hosting securely has a steep learning curve, there’s no way around that. What you’re asking for is for someone to write programs that’ll let you skip the learning curve.

GitHub is littered with abandoned attempts at doing this. You bury your lede by mentioning “your project” at the end. It’s your project going to be another well intentioned attempt that’s eventually abandoned or causes more problems than it solves?

“Has anyone noticed that medical doctors gate-keep people doing open heart surgery?”

Why do you assume self-hosting is and can be trivial? It is NOT for everybody. You should have some base level of technical knowledge. You should expect to need to learn some things. It’s not a badge of honor, it’s experience.

My project focuses on building a tool that makes self-hosting more accessible without sacrificing data ownership

Good luck with that. Don’t get your users pwned in the process. You’re now responsible for the security of people who think “opening a command line” is too difficult.

Certain minimum knowledge is required if you don’t want to be low hanging fruit for criminal botnet operators who will use your system to launch attacks.

You can’t also beg/complain about tools “made for you” not existing - if they’re not already there, it may mean the problem can’t be reduced to appliance-user level.

If you’re building such a tool, why ask? Get uptake rate and user feedback data.

What sounds like gatekeeping is often a strongly worded emphasis on having the prerequisite knowledge to not just host your services, but do it in a way that is secure, resilient, and responsible. If you don’t know how to set up a network, set up a resilient storage, manage your backups, set up HTTPS and other encryption solutions, manage user authentication and privileges, and expose your services securely, you should not be self-hosting. You should be learning how to self-host responsibly. That applies to everything from Debian to Synology.

Friends don’t let friends expose their networks like Nintendo advises.

I think much of the gatekeeping is over concern that if you mess up, you could unknowingly be allowing a sophisticated hacker to access all the data on your network, without any obvious signs. And maybe some people don’t want to field noob questions like “I clicked something and now the GUI gives a 😕 and doesn’t work anymore, what do I do?”.

There is a skill floor, I would say similarly that you wouldn’t be ready to install Linux yourself if you don’t get suspicious when a .iso download gives you a .exe file instead.

I think Yunohost is a decent solution for beginners that avoids as much of the nitty-gritty as possible. Louis Rossman has made a massive guide that’s about as close as an IKEA step-by-step as you can get with this stuff. We should be encouraging people to learn, but there is a sense of reticence to have people get too in over their heads due to cybersecurity reasons.

Edit: linked the guide

I think truenas and unraid are the only user friendly experience out of the box. Everything else needs a lot of configuring. I don’t think you can call system administration gate keeping

Some hobbies have minimal levels of skill/knowledge/equipment to properly do them, and I’d argue that self hosting is one of them. You can say people are hostile to beginners, but I might say people are trying to save them from themselves by not just telling them how to slap shit together so they can put it on the Internet and get owned by Internet Background Radiation in a short period of time.

My personal opinion is that beginners are too over confident in their skills or expect setting things up is like setting up an online account, and expect everything to be ready for them to install in their preferred method, and get upset when people tell them they need to upskill to be able to accomplish their goal.

An example of this is a conversation I had with someone online about some docker distributed app, and people were trying to get the person to use docker like the install doc says instead of trying to figure out how to just install it directly into the OS, because that’s the way they’re used to doing stuff and they were determined they weren’t going to change now despite the software author’s supported path not including direct install. If the person was willing to learn docker (which is not very difficult if you can follow a tutorial and use compose files), they’d be able to quickly accomplish what they want while also opening more doors for them in the future.

I don’t mind power users in general … but holy molly the militant foss and privacy advocates can be really annoying. Better not mention any proprietary software or you’ll get a dozens answers to a question no one asked.

If you’re hosting stuff visible to the wider world and you don’t really know what you’re doing you might have a bad time. But also just going for it is how you learn.

self-hosting

and people who want it to work with minimal friction.

We’re talking (potentially) highly sensitive contents here for the most part. Yes, selfhosting has become easier than ever, but at the same time more people who basically lack the experience and/or patience to actually understand what they’re doing want to start selfhosting. And that simply doesn’t end well in an alarmingly high number of cases.

Yeah sure, of course there are tools that can make life easier. But have a look at the “big” self-hosting packages. A lot of them will need at least some manual configuration. Then there’s the “exposing a host to the open net” aspect, which can (and usually will) introduce a whole different level of attack surfaces.

So combine that with the ever-growing number of self-hosters, and of course you will notice more advice like that.

Gate-keeping is a strong word… It also implies that people on the other side of the gate learned something to get there.

20 years ago we were doing what we could manually, and learning the hard way. The tools have improved and by now do most of the heavy lifting for us. And better tools will come along to make things even easier/better. That’s just the way it works.

Compare self-hosting to doing your own mechanic work on a vehicle: there are a lot of tasks that most ppl would benefit from learning the diy way to do it, but there are dangers to car repair that will never go away, like proper car support with jacks, securing wheels correctly, etc.

It would be neglectful for the community to say nothing and send ppl off to get pwned.

I dont find needing to knowing how to use the most common way of setting up servicss is gate keepy.

If you dont want to learn things then it probably is better to just pay someone else to handle the setup i dont think there is anything wrong with doing it that way either.

I haven’t seen that type of response, at least not at any significant frequency, but let me speculate wildly while accepting your premise for the moment.

People in general are less mentally resilient than they were 6-10 years ago, what with The Everything And All That In The Everywhere At All Times. That might manifest in less patience and less willingness to indulge beginners. So I don’t think it’s a conscious thing meant to gatekeep anything, people just don’t have the capacities to explain things again and again in detail (especially when they think the answer is easily found using the search engine of your choice) and are more easily exasperated if things don’t go smoothly.

Again, this is all assuming your premise.