Hardly gatekeeping. It may well turn away complete noobs, but docker is the easy way for a lot of stuff ATM.

> Joined 3 hours ago
> first post is concern trolling

There should be both. Minimal config + gui options for people just getting into the hobby, or just want the thing. And a more open option for people who hit the limits of the first, or to do interesting shit, or to repeatably build a thing.

I go back and forth on my server. During summer I wish it was all Docker YAMLs so I can press “update” in Dockge and then enjoy the weather.

But, I also do non-typical things. Users have a rPi in their house that captures requests and routes them through Tailscale to my server for remote access without a VPS or opening ports.

I’m not too technical so I often struggle setting things up, and documentation can be less than helpful at times, sometimes I really wished there was a gui or wizard, but it’s doable.

I don’t mind power users in general … but holy molly the militant foss and privacy advocates can be really annoying. Better not mention any proprietary software or you’ll get a dozens answers to a question no one asked.

I’ve experienced gatekeeping issues long before I got into self-hosting specifically. Years ago I wanted to learn C++ for Arduino and I was constantly talked down for asking questions.

“Why don’t you just do …” in response to a question feels very rude as a newcomer because it feels like I am being talked down to for not knowing what others already know. Even when I made an effort to show I was making an effort to learn on my own, I was still belittled.

I’m all for hearing different ways of approaching my issue but from the replies, it often feels like other people insist there is only one true specific way to handle an issue.

When I first got into self-hosting, people kept pushing Cloudflare on me. When I expressed concern over a large centralized corporation having that much control and how they might have service issues, I was mocked really hard. Half a year later and there was a significant outage and suddenly there’s all this talk about how centralized the internet is and how that is bad.

After that I took it upon myself to find alternative ways to protect myself without Cloudflare’s services but every step of the way has been an isolating experience. Every step of the way has been full of people saying that my efforts are pointless and that the bots will win anyways so I shouldn’t bother.

I decided to try to secure myself through multiple layers of obscurity and every question in that direction has been full of people saying that obscurity is not security, the bots will find you anyways!

I’ve stopped myself from asking too many questions now. I still keep learning in my direction. I feel like I’ve managed to find multiple solutions that both obscure and protect myself. I’ve constantly check my logs for months now and the bot is less than I expected in places I expect them to be and completely zero in other places I thought there would be some activity.

I want to share what I have learned and my experiences but I know I will receive backlash for deviating from the norm.

I’ve spent a lot of my self-hosting efforts trying to find ways to protect myself with minimal use of third party services, documenting as much as I could only feel afraid to share what I have learned.

This comment may not be about learning self-hosting as a beginner specifically but the vibe has been pretty damn consistent throughout me learning C++, self-hosting, linux and shell scripting. All things I enjoy but all so full of people ready to talk down to someone who wants to learn.

If it is then not enough people have heard of YUNOhost.

I think its rather expectation management. At some point you are going to see a wall of errors in command line. Even local hosting without exposing to internet will for typical user mean configuring routers because each wifi router creates NAT-ed subnet by default. Installation might be trivial but accessing your basement server from living room might not be.

My experience is that runtipi turned docker into an app store. The technical barriers to entry have never been lower. There are so many helpful voices out there that I’ve never really had to ask anyone a unique question because someone else has typically asked whatever I need to know and been answered.

I do think there are very reasonable arguments to be made that when you are opening a server containing your personal data, to outside access, you probably should be cautioned about your technical limitations. Even if it’s not pleasant to hear.

I honestly don’t think it’s a great idea for most people (myself included) to casually dabble in server administration. There’s a pretty big margin for error. Unfortunately it’s the only private solution for the time being. I don’t trust anyone else.

a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour

Developers have to eat. You can pay or do it yourself.

What sounds like gatekeeping is often a strongly worded emphasis on having the prerequisite knowledge to not just host your services, but do it in a way that is secure, resilient, and responsible. If you don’t know how to set up a network, set up a resilient storage, manage your backups, set up HTTPS and other encryption solutions, manage user authentication and privileges, and expose your services securely, you should not be self-hosting. You should be learning how to self-host responsibly. That applies to everything from Debian to Synology.

Friends don’t let friends expose their networks like Nintendo advises.

Its called superuser chauvinism.

Self hosting is not just one thing. You are system adminstrator, network engineer, security specialist, service architect and many other things, specially if you expose anything to anyone outside your very private network. And to get anything even running on that complex mess requires some knowledge on a lot of things. Making them run securely with proper backups requires even more knowledge on things.

Sure, you can just throw some docker images on your old desktop and be happy, even forward ports from the public internet to your things if you like. But that exposes your stuff to quite a lot of dangers and if you just click buttons without any understanding you’ll soon be a part of a botnet or lose your data or lose money if someone decides to mess around with your home automation or something else.

I get what you’re saying, not all of us are very polite and answers can be pretty harsh, but more often than not the generic idea behind those answers is not trying to be an asshole or gatekeep anything. It’s just that there’s a skillset you need to build things safely and if it’s clear from the start that someone looking for answers is way over their head it’s better for everyone to get them take a step back and learn instead of trying to create a meaningful answer since there’s too many variables or it’d just take immense effort to write down comprehensive guide on what to do, why and how for everything from the ground up.

I know for a fact that in my area there’s a bunch of surveillance cameras, home automation stuff and even some farm equipment directly open to the public network just because someone just plugged things in without any idea on the whole picture. Sometimes the correct answer is ‘stop shooting yourself on the foot and learn the basics first, then come back’.

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.

Docker, copy-paste yaml definitions and shit are the automated/user-friendly solution. There are projects that provide things that you want, they are either proprietary or cloud-based, or paid.

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