Hi all, I’ve been noticing a pattern in self-hosting communities, and I’m curious if others see it too.
Whenever someone asks for a more beginner-friendly solution, something with a UI, automated setup, or fewer manual configs, there’s often a response like:
“If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
Sometimes it feels like a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technical side of self-hosting. I enjoy tinkering, breaking things, fixing them, learning along the way. That’s how most of us got into it.
But here’s the question: Is gatekeeping slowing down the adoption of self-hosting?
If we want more people to own their data, escape Big Tech, and embrace open-source alternatives, shouldn’t we welcome solutions that lower the entry barrier?
There’s room for everyone:
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people who want full control and custom setups,
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people who want semi-manual but guided,
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and people who want it to work with minimal friction.
Just like not every Linux user compiles from source, but they’re still Linux users.
Where do you stand? Should self-hosting stay DIY-only or is there value in easier, more accessible ways to self-host?
My project focuses on building a tool that makes self-hosting more accessible without sacrificing data ownership, so I genuinely want your honest take before releasing it more widely.
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Some hobbies have minimal levels of skill/knowledge/equipment to properly do them, and I’d argue that self hosting is one of them. You can say people are hostile to beginners, but I might say people are trying to save them from themselves by not just telling them how to slap shit together so they can put it on the Internet and get owned by Internet Background Radiation in a short period of time.
My personal opinion is that beginners are too over confident in their skills or expect setting things up is like setting up an online account, and expect everything to be ready for them to install in their preferred method, and get upset when people tell them they need to upskill to be able to accomplish their goal.
An example of this is a conversation I had with someone online about some docker distributed app, and people were trying to get the person to use docker like the install doc says instead of trying to figure out how to just install it directly into the OS, because that’s the way they’re used to doing stuff and they were determined they weren’t going to change now despite the software author’s supported path not including direct install. If the person was willing to learn docker (which is not very difficult if you can follow a tutorial and use compose files), they’d be able to quickly accomplish what they want while also opening more doors for them in the future.
If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting
Yes, absolutely.
Configure Docker
if you cannot run
docker compose upor understand the basics of what it’s doing, you should not be self hosting. Yes, Docker can be difficult to troubleshoot but you need to understand where your data is being stored and generally self hosting projects using Docker are easy to set up.reverse proxies
Implying exposing your server to the Internet. Yes. 100%. If you do not know what you’re doing, you should not. This is dangerous to your machine and to your data.
Yaml files
This is a plain text file. You can open it with Notepad or your operating system’s equivalent. Editing a text file to enter some default parameters is a low bar and if you can’t edit a text file, you’re going to get caught up in some other part of self hosting
You made pretty much every point exactly how I was going to make it.
I will mention that even as a pretty experienced sysadmin, learning Docker, reverse proxies, and relevant config files took ages because there are treated as assumed knowledge.
Every YouTube video on Docker is 30 minutes shorter than they should be, and terminology for reverse proxies is really confusing if you’re not already familiar.
It’s great to say you shouldn’t use these if you’re not familiar, but these are also probably the most poorly taught subjects in computing right now from my experience.
Been using reserve proxies for some server setup. Still don’t understand how it really works
The very rough idea is this:
I have a server with multiple services and only one open port (not counting the SSL port) on my router.
Traffic comes into that one port straight to my server. That server has a reverse proxy installed with a directory of subdomains and associated ports.
It internally routes traffic coming in on my open port to the internal services on the server without having to expose them directly to the internet.
The big advantage is that because it all goes through my reverse proxy, I can add SSL certs to just that and now all of my subdomain services get the benefits of the SSL cert on the host.
I’m sure there are other uses for reverse proxies, but this is how they work in my setup.
I think you’ve missed the point OP is trying to communicate. It’s not that these things aren’t relevant, highly important, and good caution/warning. It’s the gate that people are creating with these no depth explainers. “you need to understand” “if you don’t know” – then fail to provide direction to people who want to know, to learn these things, to figure out where to start; that’s the gate.
“If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
If this is an example of gatekeeping, I think you are misjudging.
Whenever self-hosting there’s a very real risk of exposing your private data to the internet. Potentially a lot more private data than you’d otherwise expose via cloud providers. This risk necessitates a basic understanding of some of the importand bits and how to operate them securely. If not for that, then anything would go.
Understanding docker, reverse proxy, and YAML which is used to configure those is part of probably the simplest way to get to secure self-hosting. I’d add a self-hosted VPN to access local resources. I’m not aware of a magic UI solution that does it all and securely. Docker compose files are very accessible. A couple of those followed by
docker compose up -dand you have a basic env up and running.Generally the lack of knowledge in X or Y doesn’t mean there’s necessarily an easier path than learning X and Y and that you’re being gatekept by being told you have to learn X and Y. Some things are harder than others. Buying Apple Cloud and setting it up is easier than self-hosting Nextcloud. I don’t think that should be the case, but today it is as far as I’m aware.
Self hosting doesn’t inherently mean your stuff is publicly accessible, though.
Yes, but self-hosting does whatever the HOWTO, YouTube vid or AI slop the user follows tells them to do. If the user doesn’t know the basics, how could they know what an instruction for activating UPnP does or opening a NAT port does and why that might expose their data? Laymen don’t even understand what making theie stuff publicly accessible means. It might simply mean “Yay I can access my stuff on the go.” 😄
If on the other had the user learns the basics, they can tell when a doc instructs them to do something dangerous and they can do something about it to avoid disaster.
Gate-keeping is a strong word… It also implies that people on the other side of the gate learned something to get there.
20 years ago we were doing what we could manually, and learning the hard way. The tools have improved and by now do most of the heavy lifting for us. And better tools will come along to make things even easier/better. That’s just the way it works.
Compare self-hosting to doing your own mechanic work on a vehicle: there are a lot of tasks that most ppl would benefit from learning the diy way to do it, but there are dangers to car repair that will never go away, like proper car support with jacks, securing wheels correctly, etc.
It would be neglectful for the community to say nothing and send ppl off to get pwned.
You’re confusing a lack of handholding with gatekeeping.
beginner friendly solution, something with a UI, fewer manual configs…
First, you’re not entirely right. you can get a ton of self hosting done with things like Synology or Home assistant, and never see the complexity. You might get owned by a botnet, but it “works.”
Self hosting securely has a steep learning curve, there’s no way around that. What you’re asking for is for someone to write programs that’ll let you skip the learning curve.
GitHub is littered with abandoned attempts at doing this. You bury your lede by mentioning “your project” at the end. It’s your project going to be another well intentioned attempt that’s eventually abandoned or causes more problems than it solves?
You bury your lede by mentioning “your project” at the end.
Basically means the user has to trust that project to do the right thing and be maintained to keep their setup secure.
That’s generally true for any end user software.
Is this a troll post?
Every response I read here seems to get it. Yeah, you shouldn’t do risky things without understanding them first. By all means play around with self hosting without knowing anything at first, but do not expose your machine to the Internet without fully understanding the implications and do not complain that self hosting is hard. If you think it is, you just need a bit more education. It’s already incredibly easy these days.
This made me look up freedom box.
Depends on the community. I’ve met some very helpful noob-friendly developers who recognize you’re a noob and will use simpler terms to guide you through the process, and passive aggressive assholes that’ll ignore your messages the very second they figure out you’re a noob. Even though they were literally just talking to you seconds before.
Yes.
Source: this thread
Agree. “Are you perhaps too angry?”, “The HELL I’m not! F*ck off !”, “alrighty then”…
I don’t see this phenomenon. Maybe people suggest those things to use because frankly, they’re a very fundamental part of the self-hosting landscape, and you’re see it as “you must use these”. Use whatever the hell you want and pay the price for doing it the hard way, by all means. But saying people are gatekeeping isn’t the way I see this community.
I think truenas and unraid are the only user friendly experience out of the box. Everything else needs a lot of configuring. I don’t think you can call system administration gate keeping
> Joined 3 hours ago
> first post is concern trollingIf you’re hosting stuff visible to the wider world and you don’t really know what you’re doing you might have a bad time. But also just going for it is how you learn.
I’m self hosting to learn. I’ve been hacked before and I lost stuff and then I refined my technique and started over again. Nothing I do is “mission critical”, so I now have the mindset that it will fail, I will lose data and time and I will get hacked. Honestly, it’s helped me to be better at home and at my workplace to have this mindset. Always plan for failure (and keep backups).
Just like not every Linux user compiles from source, but they’re still Linux users.
Yes. In theory.
But in practise, this is the one great unsolved mystery of Linux.
And maybe self hosting has a similar one.
