Self-hosted FOSS apps are probably the best push towards computing freedom and privacy today. But I wish that the self-hosting community moved towards a true distributed architecture, instead of trying to mimic the paradigms of corporate centralized software. This is not meant as a criticism against the current self-hosted architecture or the apps. But I wish the community focused on a different set of features that suite the home computing conditions more closely:
1. Peer-to-peer model of decentralization like bittorrent, instead of the client-server model. Local web UIs (like Transmission's web UI) may be served locally (either host-only or LAN-only) as frontend for these apps. Consider this as the 'last-mile connectivity' if you will.
2. Applications are resistant to outages. Obviously, home servers can't be expected to be always online. It may even be running on you regular desktops. But you shouldn't lose the utility of the service just because it goes offline. A great example of this is the email service. They can wait for up to 2 days for the destination server to show up before declaring a delivery failure. Even rejections are handled with retries minutes later.
3. The applications should be able to deal with dynamic IPs and NATs. We will probably need a cryptographic identity mechanism and a way to translate that into a connection to the correct end node. But most of these technologies exist today.
4. E2E encrypted and redundant storage and distribution servers for data that must absolutely be online all the time. Nostr relays seem like a good example.
The Solid and Nostr projects embody many of these ideas already. It just needs a bit more polish to feel natural and intuitive. One way to do it is to have a local daemon that acts as a gateway, cache and web-ui to external data.
Yeah, I have been planning to try out Iroh sometime soon. However, what I explained will take a whole lot of planning on top of Iroh. I also don't want to replicate what others have already achieved. It would be best if something could be built on top of those. Let's see how it goes.
> Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird.
I apologize if it was confusing. I was suggesting the exact opposite. It's not about how to build a mini enterprise cluster. It's about how to change the service infrastructure to suit the small computers we usually find at homes, without any modifications. I'm suggesting a more fundamental change.
> I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.
It isn't too bad where I'm at, either. But sadly, that isn't the practical situation elsewhere. We need to treat power and connectivity as random and intermittent.
You can do this now. It would likely require packaging your services up in Windows installers that deploy Windows services. Will run across most computers you find in homes.
1. Peer-to-peer model of decentralization like bittorrent, instead of the client-server model. Local web UIs (like Transmission's web UI) may be served locally (either host-only or LAN-only) as frontend for these apps. Consider this as the 'last-mile connectivity' if you will.
2. Applications are resistant to outages. Obviously, home servers can't be expected to be always online. It may even be running on you regular desktops. But you shouldn't lose the utility of the service just because it goes offline. A great example of this is the email service. They can wait for up to 2 days for the destination server to show up before declaring a delivery failure. Even rejections are handled with retries minutes later.
3. The applications should be able to deal with dynamic IPs and NATs. We will probably need a cryptographic identity mechanism and a way to translate that into a connection to the correct end node. But most of these technologies exist today.
4. E2E encrypted and redundant storage and distribution servers for data that must absolutely be online all the time. Nostr relays seem like a good example.
The Solid and Nostr projects embody many of these ideas already. It just needs a bit more polish to feel natural and intuitive. One way to do it is to have a local daemon that acts as a gateway, cache and web-ui to external data.