> in most cases it's as expensive, or more expensive, than having someone else do it for you, and requires a huge amount of skill
What is expensive? Hosting from home has a lot of benefits if you’re not behind CGNat and how we used to do things when I was 13. If a 13 year old can figure out port forwarding and DNS I’m fairly certain you can.
I’m aware there are drawbacks but a $5 VPS is not outside the realm of reason if you want an additional level of reliability and are scared people will ddos your line.
Sysadmin skills are so easy these days they’re forcing developers to do it as an additional part of their responsibilities.
Either it’s easy: and everyone should do it.
Or it’s not: and we should start bringing back sysadmins.
> If a 13 year old can figure out port forwarding and DNS I’m fairly certain you can.
I think the truth is the reverse. To me, it feels much more likely that a curious 13-year-old with plenty of time on their hands can figure out port forwarding, than a middle-aged (or older) adult who has little technical skill and little desire to develop technical skill. And that probably encompasses most of the people on the planet.
> I’m aware there are drawbacks but a $5 VPS is not outside the realm of reason
$5/mo is absolutely too much for many, many people on Earth.
> Sysadmin skills are so easy these days
I feel like you are incredibly out of touch with the average internet user.
You are missing the point, it is unreasonable to expect everyone who wants to participate to be able to run their own server. It is too specific a skill.
Imagine if you had to learn how to be a mechanic in order to own a car, the number of people who would able to dedicate the time to own a car would be far fewer.
My mom wouldn’t know what the hell an NTF even is, and if I tried to explain it to her she surely wouldn’t see any value in them and wonder why anyone would be stupid enough to pay for one.
The big expense is time and the third way is that we scale up by having sysadmins and developers create services that are significantly easier to use and maintain as a whole.
If you're looking for a solid example of this look at Instagram which at the time of it's sale had 13 employees and ~10 million users.
Even if all 10 million of those folks had the expertise to run their own server, keep it updated and secure, keep backups, etc. it's still just wildly more efficient to have it centralized and hosted for you.
But we're not talking about people running big websites, we talk about people running stuff like pi-hole and mastodon instances. It's all very rough around the edges right now, but the idea of distributed platforms is not to eliminate big sites run by big companies, that will always exist, but we could also have people running micro services for their own needs right on the devices they already use (phones, tables, laptops, nfs boxes), without needing any extra expertise for that, just like they run a phone app right now to check email or weather.
It's rough around the edges for someone who is technically skilled and has some experience in system administration.
For others (the vast majority of internet users), it's a nigh impossible task.
I feel like everything in this space is perpetually "rough around the edges", and has been that way for decades. I don't have confidence that it'll be any different this time.
> Sysadmin skills are so easy these days they’re forcing developers to do it as an additional part of their responsibilities.
Nah most devops is IaC and sysops with very little if any dev. As some one that edits yaml files all day, I will die on the yaml is not "dev work" hill.
"If a 13 year old can figure out port forwarding and DNS I’m fairly certain you can."
Go ahead and take a poll of people who would want to do that, even after understanding it's 'relatively easy'.
I'm in tech and the thought of having to maintain my own infra makes me recoil.
You can build your own house, fix your own car, do your own plumbing, run your own servers if you want, but if you do, it's most likely for some niche reason, not because it's convenient and most people probably just don't want to go with this approach.
What is expensive? Hosting from home has a lot of benefits if you’re not behind CGNat and how we used to do things when I was 13. If a 13 year old can figure out port forwarding and DNS I’m fairly certain you can.
I’m aware there are drawbacks but a $5 VPS is not outside the realm of reason if you want an additional level of reliability and are scared people will ddos your line.
Sysadmin skills are so easy these days they’re forcing developers to do it as an additional part of their responsibilities.
Either it’s easy: and everyone should do it.
Or it’s not: and we should start bringing back sysadmins.
Doesn’t cut both ways.