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:
-
people who want full control and custom setups,
-
people who want semi-manual but guided,
-
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
I agree with a lot of the folks here. I don’t think it’s gate-kept. It’s just part of self hosting. I have a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people about self josting, open source, and how to get it all running. There are great projects out there that provide incredibly powerful UIs, TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, Unraid, Proxmox, NextCloud, HomeAssistant, NetBird, Pangolin, NGinX Proxy Manager, Portainer, and so many more. All designed to make self hosting easier and safer. I know 8 or 10 other creators who also do self hosting and how to’s. It does require learning, time, and dedication. As does anything worth while.
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.
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.
Absolutely agree. I have been thinking of starting a selfhost guide that takes you through the different ways to selfhost and the basic concepts of it, but gave up because I’m a shit writer and my experiences are mostly docker, k8s and Terraform/OpenTofu.
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
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.
Nah, I don’t think its being gatekept. I got into self hosting earlier this year, so I have pretty fresh eyes as a new novice.
This community here has been an incredible resource for learning and asking questions, and people here are generally very helpful and kind.
“If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
- No, and I don’t see this perspective pushed. You do have to eventually learn how to do these things though if you want to be able to selfhost in most capacities.
Is telling people they have to learn traffic laws before driving gatekeeping driving now?
Is this a troll post?
self-hosting
and people who want it to work with minimal friction.
We’re talking (potentially) highly sensitive contents here for the most part. Yes, selfhosting has become easier than ever, but at the same time more people who basically lack the experience and/or patience to actually understand what they’re doing want to start selfhosting. And that simply doesn’t end well in an alarmingly high number of cases.
Yeah sure, of course there are tools that can make life easier. But have a look at the “big” self-hosting packages. A lot of them will need at least some manual configuration. Then there’s the “exposing a host to the open net” aspect, which can (and usually will) introduce a whole different level of attack surfaces.
So combine that with the ever-growing number of self-hosters, and of course you will notice more advice like that.
Yeah, self‑hosting without some basic knowledge can be risky, especially when handling sensitive data. At the same time, very strict warnings, even if well‑meaning, can be intimidating for newcomers.
Self hosting isn’t for everyone, of course, but for those genuinely interested, even if they don’t have years of technical experience, there could be a safer, guided first step. Something that helps people learn the basics while keeping their setup secure and giving them confidence to explore further.
If 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).
This made me look up freedom box.
I’ve been following this community for a while now and have not yet found the courage to selfhost anything.
I find the answers generally either assume a lot of knowledge, or throw out a single solution provider (synology, nextcloud, yunohost). Neither of these approaches helps me advance the big picture overview that I’m lacking, or a way of evaluating what the best setup is for me. I’ve started drafting an overview document for myself with the vague idea of asking for feedback here but I’m not sure such a request would be welcome.
So, yes, I would be interested in a solution that makes self-hosting more accessible.
Honestly the best thing to do is just start trying things and don’t only rely on your own stuff until you have a good understanding.
Just get an old computer and install an os you want to learn, worst case you break it and reinstall.
I suggest proxmox since you can lean on community scripts and can backup and restore any containers pretty easily if needed.
But as with anything don’t go in expecting to be perfect, just get started, break some eggs and learn from mistakes. You will learn what you like about it, what you would change and you can burn it all down and start again if you want as well.
The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.
Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.
As an aside, be careful running your laptop with the lid closed. Some need to be open for proper cooling.
Find the skills gaps that you have; find the thing that interests you about it; and dig into that fundamental piece, don’t understand what the fundamentals might be, go check out .edu, or certification outlines with the vocabulary/knowledge you do have so you can build from the concepts (and benefit from their already determined progressions) , so you can developed additional vocabulary and knowledge of the discipline.
