I don't mean to be too mean to cloud-hobbyists. Obviously that is a lot of what the fediverse is. That's what this instance I am on is. I just want to be a bit critical to inspire some reflection on what people mean by "self-hosting". I have had a minority viewpoint on this for years. It seems most people want self-hosting to be the badge for their cloud computing hobby and I want to challenge that.

It still really bothers me that tech-people seem to consider a self-managed cloud service's VPS "self-hosting". In a social context there is some benefit from self-management and moderation even on centralized hosting, but when people setup a "personal cloud" and it isn't on their own hardware I think the added benefits are limited.

If I wanted to, I could use any untrustworthy megacorp's free cloud storage privately just by encrypting files before uploading them. If you host your files on Nextcloud on a managed VPS that's no different than trusting the hosting provider with your unencrypted files and would actually be worse.

Self-hosting should be defined in opposition to a asymmetric up/down relationship to the web we've lived in for our entire lives. Not just be a rebranding of the same physical architecture of centralized datacenters. If you are just replicating the same issues with trusting "the cloud" with FOSS licensed webapps that doesn't really solve anything. Not to mention that at the root of my frustration people have taken "self-hosting" to mean investing in centralized network services rather than divesting from them entirely. Or the fact that you literally don't have the host machine to your own damn self.

I've written this rant about a dozen different times. And I will keep doing it as long as the goddamn cloud people keep making a mockery of the term.

I can't afford actual self-hosting and I am not fooling myself into thinking I can with a monthly cloud hosting subscription and a strong dose of cognitive dissonance. That's renting. I want to move away from renting. I want to own my infrastructure. I want our clients to also be servers. I want symmetric up/down on all residential connections. You, the VPS subscriber, the FOSS SaSS customer, you and I are not after the same thing.

Call if self-managed cloud. Call it your VPS cloud lab. There is nothing "self" about rent, or so-called "subscriptions".

It is too expensive as a real goal for an individual and we need technological and societal solutions. Moving the goalposts to make it a consumable and marketable subscription-based hobby activity makes it about nothing.

The current thinking seems to be "that would be a hard goal, so I don't want that to be what self-hosting means because I am a vain consumerist who wants something immediately achievable via subscription purchases".

That's not necessarily a bad thing to do (it is obviously a very fun hobby for those who can afford it), but why do you need to hijack the term "self-hosting" for it? Maybe "independent hosting" would be a better fit? Surely *anything* would be more accurate than "self-hosting" which is just a weird lie. I just can't get this off my mind every time I see it mentioned in a public forum.

Anwyays. Self-hosting by my understanding has more to do with a normal client web browser that doubles as a web host than a DigitalOcean droplet or whatever. At the very least, it implies usage of your LAN for hosting *some* of your "self-hosted" content. In more luxurious cases it would imply a "home lab" (now that term makes sense!).