What are the most promising projects/services aiming at making self hosting easier for everyone?
I have never used it but from the website I gather that it’s an app (literally, there’s a mobile app) which enables you to remotely set up a VPS with a set of services at generic VPS hosting providers like Hetzner or DigitalOcean with the click of a few buttons.
It builds on NixOS which naturally lends itself to abstraction. They have created a pre-made NixOS configuration which configures these services to sensible defaults and provides a few highly abstract options which the user must set themselves. “Enable service xyz”, “Enable backups for services a, b, and c”.
I assume these are set using a UI; producing a JSON like this. All the generic NixOS config then needs to do is simply consumes the JSON and set the internal options accordingly. But the user doesn’t need to care about any of that, the experienced people who maintain this NixOS config do it for them.
I don’t know how well it works currently but I absolutely see and love the vision. Imagine being able to deploy all the cloud services you need on your own VPS by creating a few accounts, copy pasting API tokens and then simply tapping sliders and buttons in a mobile app. I can absolutely see that becoming suitable for the masses.
My favorite has been Sandstorm.io ever since I discovered it. Sure, it doesn’t look as pretty as the others, but it’s super easy if you use one of their free hostnames.
Yunohost for me as well. My only prior self-hosting experience was installing Nextcloudpi images for raspberry pi, and it was a similar experience once I knew how to forward ports on my router etc.
It even automatically set up an email server and XMPP server by default. I don’t use XMPP and hadn’t planned on hosting my own email, but, here I am. Installing apps feels like using a mobile app store. Hosting nextcloud, freshRSS, static blog, WordPress, listmonk, wallabag, other stuff on a small ARM SBC, with plenty of resources left.
I don’t even really know how it works 😅 but I contribute on Liberapay and try to keep good backups and only install well-rated apps.
I thought maybe an NGO or non-profit subsidized by a gov’t (e.g. taxing ISPs or telecos) would work for stuff within a geographic region, just like allocate server space and the main benefit would be to have a knowledgeable citizenry/residents of tech stuff.
Other comments already pointed to some very good software solutions.
But I would argue that absolutely the biggest barrier to entry for the masses is hardware.
Restoring an old PC or making some cable spaghetti with some SBC is currently too advanced for average person.
Self-hosting for the masses would require some new form of home servers.
Something modular, where adding new components would be as easy as playing with Lego bricks.
