The New Internet

As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network, I've had a feeling more and more that we're on the cusp of something transformative... For those who want it and those who care. There's an ecosystem of mostly FOSS software now designed to run on a home network and replace big, centralized, cloud providers. That software is right on the edge of being easy enough for everyone to use and for sufficient numbers of people to deploy and administer. News like Immich (to replace Google Photos) getting a major investment thanks to Louis Rossman and FUTO [1] is encouraging. The ecosystem of software you can now run on a commodity built NAS or homelab is, for me, the most exciting thing in computing since I first used the Internet in the late 90s.

The rollout and transformation, if it happens, won't look like all this stuff becoming so easy that every individual can run a server. But it is possible that every extended family will have at least one member who can run a server or administer a private network for the whole clan. And that's where tech like tailscale's offering will come in. That's where I see the author's vision being a believable moonshot:

Each extended family, and some small communities, with their own little interconnected, distributed network-citadels, behind the firewalls of which they do their computing, their sharing, and their work. Most family members won't need to understand it any more than they understand the centralized clouds they use now. And most networks won't be as well secured as a massive company can make its cloud offering, but a patchwork heterogeneity of network-citadels creates its own sort of security, and significantly lowers the value of any one "citadel" to even motivated adversaries.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyTPqxgqgjU

> As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network

Funnily enough, I was once like this but now I have deliberately moved everything to the big cloud providers as I don’t want to deal with the toil of running my own homelab anymore. This is coming from someone who used to have a FreeBSD server with ZFS disks and using jails to run various things like pf, samba, etc. Eventually things would fail and it felt like I was back at work again when all I want to do is drink a cold beer and watch YouTube.

Perhaps I will try again one day as things get easier. For now I am content with having my photos and videos automatically synced up to iCloud/Google Photos.

I tried once or twice in the early 2010s to set up a home server and had a similar experience to what you describe. Stuff would break and I wouldn't want to spend time fixing it.

I think part of the excitement I'm feeling is that the ecosystem today feels way more stable and mature than it did a decade to a decade and a half ago. Home Assistant, Jellyfin, TrueNAS, and a few other things have all pretty much run themselves for me with almost no downtime (other than one blackout that happened while I was traveling and drained my UPS) for the past nine months. There's tinkering to get it all up and running, but way less maintenance than I remember in the past.

Totally this. I am old enough to remember LAN fun times. And writing software since 1970s at high school.

And Tailscale works for me to create my own network of phones, laptops, desktops and a remote node at DO. Works brilliantly to cross geo boundaries, borders, wifi networks(home has multiple) and seamless moving between mobile networks and wired.

Not sure will create a new internet or not but at least a new intranet where all my devices are reachable and controllable.

I am curious about what your setup was, I have several systems, not sure I would call it a homelab but I rarely have to do anything. I am using Truenas for my ZFS storage and I have a few NUCs to run extra QoL services.

The only time I do anything with this stuff is when I want to upgrade (which is very rare) or add something. My NAS solution is a custom mini-ITX I built 8 years ago which I feel has more than paid for itself. I have long stopped chasing the latest and greatest because most of what has been produced in the last decade is very usable.

Very wary of going cloud, as I can't as easily control costs.

> But it is possible that every extended family will have at least one member who can run a server

That's as may be; but many, many people have no access to an "extended family". And extended families are not necessarily warm, safe spaces where everyone trusts everyone else; extended families are more likely to be "broken" than nuclear families.

> And extended families are not necessarily warm, safe spaces where everyone trusts everyone else; extended families are more likely to be "broken" than nuclear families.

It is a good thing to promote and advance privacy, security, and freedom to isolated, atomized individuals; but it is important for all of humanity to promote and advance those same ideals to extended families. People who have no access to an extended family will ultimately either join a different one or disappear into the mists of ages past. In 100 years, the Earth will be populated mostly by the descendants of people in extended families today, however imperfect or even broken those extended families may be. If those people today don't see privacy, security, and freedom as both possible and worthy, their descendants may not value or even possess any of those ideals.

>at least one member who can run a server

It may be highly unlogical, but maybe by shooting for zero it would be possible to bat 1000?

I do everything it takes so that the "extended family" site just works after I leave, as long as the "operator" can keep track of their USB sticks.

Scrap PCs being used as media servers have no internal drive.

Boots to the stick containing the server app.

Accesses media on a second stick containing the files.

Hotplug the media stick to emulate game-cartridge/VCR-cassette convenience.

Upon server failure or massive update, replace that particular stick with a backup or later version, or in the worst case get another scrap PC.

I know, easier said than done :/

A medieval castle could be defended by surprisingly few people, but not by zero people. And a castle full of people who don't know how to fortify and maintain its defenses eventually becomes someone else's castle.

Aiming for zero required sysadmins in the short term after your own passing, I think the computers you leave behind will run into a similar case of the same general problem in the long term: there's no such thing as an entropy proof system. Castle walls erode and weapons rust if there are no skilled people to maintain them. Computer components slowly break down due to ordinary wear and tear. Software configurations become obsolete and unable to talk with other software, and become less secure as vulnerabilities are discovered over time. If there are no skilled people at all to maintain a familial network-citadel, it will eventually break down and fall into disuse.

What are the hard parts of hosting from home? What solutions have you been using?

You have hit the nail on the head.

Especially with passing, eventually it's like the siege of the Alamo, when the walls do end up breached there's not a soldier there that can do any good.

It's shoestrings anyway and amazing it's working for now :)