Fuck the cloud (2009)

Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...

Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.

To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.

A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).

And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).

For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.

You never go full cloud.

""Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad."

Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology

Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs

If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead

If no, then why is "hosting" the term used

This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer

This sounds like a filter bubble plus wishful thinking. Most people can barely manage their phone settings, let alone run a homelab.

This is very much bubble thinking.

The traffic on every social media is increasing.

There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop”

Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips

I agree about Obsidian Sync, I'm a happy user.

A distinction worth making is between "self-hosting" (running docker-compose, Proxmox, etc.) and "local-first software" (applications that store data on your own machine with no cloud infrastructure required). The former is hard, the latter is just how desktop software worked before SaaS took over.

In small business software the shift has been nearly total. Tools aimed at craft makers, small food producers, etc. have almost universally migrated to monthly subscriptions. The practical result: you're paying $tens-$hundreds/month to track whether you have enough beeswax for your next candle batch, the price increases annually, and if the vendor folds you get 90 days to export your data (if you're lucky).

These users won't set up a homelab, but a desktop app that installs normally, stores data locally, works offline, and has a one-time price is achievable - I've been building one [1] and it's a reasonable middle ground between "trust us with your data forever" and "configure your own NAS."

[1] https://kitted.site (inventory and production management for small manufacturers)

> The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync

Obsidian Sync gets around a major platform problem with Apple iOS devices, which is that they don't allow one app to change the data of another. You can use Syncthing for local E2EE sync, but it won't work on your mobile due to this. It works fantastic machine to machine. I'm paying for Obsidian Sync now just to get around that, but it shows how some of the platforms are made to prevent functionality. Ostensibly its for security, but I'd argue the benefit is mainly financial for app makers (and therefore their app store cut).

> If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough

It used to be easy enough in the 90s, when plenty of folks had their own custom website. You signed up with a hosting company; they provided you with a bunch of different ways to upload files; your website was hosted.

Of late, I've decided that the problem is that HTML development halted at what is still a very beta product. HTMX is a reasonable attempt to continue the spirit of HTML; where I'm going with this is that I think HTML should have continued to add enough reasonable features, without needing Javascript or massive amounts of CSS, so that most websites most people wanted to develop would still be straightforward enough to do. HTML stopped before it even had a usable <table> with sorting and filtering defined, so we've spent decades with inferior tables in every web app that all suck compared to what we got used to with even Windows 3.1 apps. HTML finally grew date and colour pickers but it should have had all kinds of rich UI controls and behaviour that would have made it totally unnecessary for people to build all the Javascript middleware that essentially treats the browser as a display canvas and otherwise totally reimplements the GUI from scratch. And we wonder why the beautiful new Macbook Neo is kneecapped by only having 8GB????

It's time for HTML6. My standard will be: everything a restaurant website needs should be basically batteries included, with the exception of an e-commerce backend. It should all be doable in static HTML files with almost no Javascript and really just enough CSS to set artistic theming elements instead of having to do arcane shit just to position things.

> half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work.

Thankfully, the converse: the computers these days are focused on nothing else but learning how humans work.

Hell, half the world doesn't even have a computer with a physical keyboard.

A copy for people who want to read the article :

https://archive.md/Q0DYu

So what? It will be back up.

Sometimes you fuck the cloud, sometimes the cloud fucks you

or https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.tex...

the irony

Flared by the cloud.. sic

If you actually mean offshore as in located in a different country or especially a different continent, then that is a terrible idea for latency for many forms of computation. There are acceptable use cases, eg when round trips are infrequent and average latency is already high like batch workloads or some forms of LLM, but even then closer compute is pretty much always a better experience.

> home lab

Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions.

What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable).

It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glues together some useful home server utilities that sound interesting to you.

My setup is roughly speaking: Ubuntu LTS, ZFS (with 4 disks in a RAID10 style config), and a docker compose file that runs plex, transmission, syncthing, vaultwarden behind an nginx-proxy[1] container that even automagically renews my Let's Encrypt certs for me (though it's probably even easier if you use a Cloudflare tunnel).

If you're confident all your apps are available on these platforms, the storage part is easier with something like TruNAS or Unraid. If you don't need storage at all you can slim down your hardware a lot and just use a raspberry pi.

IMO, just find an old beater machine and get hacking :)

[1]: https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy

>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.

Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years

Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.

This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.

Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)

We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.

An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.

We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.

People overengineer homelabs all the time for fun and practice. To selfhost (which is not, in fact, the same thing), you can get a mini PC and probably host all of the basics. A small two-bay NAS plus a mini PC and you're really cooking with gas.

Homelab = Experimenting with environments you might use at work. Selfhost = Hosting what you need at home.

These are two very different goals with very different reasonable choices. People homelab with Kubernetes clusters, selfhosting with Kubernetes is dumb.

It’s like drugs, the first hit is cheap or free, but you end up spending all your money and your entire life on it!

Just get an old server for free somewhere and go …

The irony.

That's really odd. If I remember correctly Jason Scott has talked in his podcast about how textfiles.com is a co-lo'd self hosted box. I wonder what "resource limit" got hit.

Thanks, Macroexpanded, and some others too...

Fuck the Cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 - Dec 2015 (219 comments)

Fuck the cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)

Fuck the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885 - Jan 2009 (23 comments)

All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.

I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.

Yeah I have all this data backed up on a couple different drives. IRC and ICQ logs going back to when I was a teenager. Digitised photos from when I was a kid through to the present day. Source code for projects I worked on from when I was 10. Rips of all the cds I used to own. And yes, email exports dating back to about 2003.

I wish I kept more, honestly. It’s a beautiful record.

I think my most treasured possession is videos of myself and my parents from when I was young. I’m thinking of sitting my sisters kids down in front of a camera for 15 minutes and getting them to talk about their life. It’s beautiful to rewatch this stuff decades later. It’s transporting.

> How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it".

As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask.

I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet.

Funny you bring up Gmail as a positive example when they reneged on their promise of unlimited storage 5 years ago.

Most of my media is backed up on my Unraid server, the most important stuff is backed up on an external drive and I also have some things that exist in the cloud, which I do not trust, which is why it's tiered as least important.

I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying).

I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.

Uhhh, me? My home directory has 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit. (But not HN, I should look into that.)

The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet.

I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.

> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.

Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy.

> Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.

I think that's conflating different use-cases.

* Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship.

* In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.

I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.

All of mine, but I guess I'm an exception to the rule.

I've been reading it for a couple years already, where have yall been looking? At marketing materials?

See e.g. https://aphyr.com/tags/the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-gu...

(That whole series is also available as PDF; I recommend printing it, spiral-binding the printout kinda like a pirated college textbook, and surreptitiously leaving it in cafes and the like.)

Neither would be fucked if they were open source.

Or if they had a ton of viable competition.