I'm pretty technically competent compared to the majority of people you tell that to, but even just ssl certificates are a pain in the ass.

and now that I got it working, dns broke something because my reverse proxy did not change, even though I'm pretty sure I also didn't change my dns rules.

I barely know how to troubleshoot this, most of my time is bouncing between 5 things and guessing. Most people you tell it to? good luck, unless that's the only thing they're hosting on the machine.

but that's not a me thing; I can solve this eventually. I have the time, and I know it will work because it already did.

however.

it is an indictment.

every day I throw away two to thirty days because I want to do a thing, I get less likely to ever even bother. I do not have the time to waste, or the money to enable me to waste it.

last time I spent two days on something I learned how to weld. Before that, I stripped and re-built my e-bike.

I cleaned an entire garage in eight hours. I built and learned how to use the 3d printer from a kit that mostly was just 'heres all the parts you'll need. good luck'. the list goes on. There's a real opportunity cost to doing any of this, until it's working. But until it's working, the opportunity cost is catastrophically high.

every few months I decide to gamble, and get slapped in the face again. I do not have that many days I can spend, these days.

I eventually had so many tabs that I stopped bothering to check if I still had something open in a tab and just did new ones, because it went off the window. Do you want to know how many times i bounced between websites? at least 180.

(OBS exists now, if you're serious about testing you might have your friend who doesn't know the stack record their screen and active window and mouse position to do a time-motion-study and then add to your docs accordingly)

1. i have a homelab, complete with 4 virtualization hosts running proxmox, and a NAS exposing ZFS datasets over SMB.

2. i have a fully segmented home network, featuring no less then 4 subnets (i'd add more if my wifi ap wasn't a total shitbox), fully-functional dualstack v4-v6 networking and multiple layers of dns for split-brain purposes and adblocking.

3. i've got plex, a matrix-synapse homeserver, and an archiveteam worker on there, and i plan to add a nextcloud install.

4. i've got access to my media library wherever I go, and i've got my own chat service i can connect to with a cute little vanity name (ruby:isincredibly.gay). plus it's all working to backup website we're at risk of losing forever in the background.

let me say this as loudly as i can for the people in the back

i should not need to know about the first 3 to achieve the 4th

i have been maintaining this shit for years. an immesurably huge chunk of my free time goes into learning the exact ins and outs of how everything works, so that i can make sure my systems are not just operational, but operating to modern standards.

i could recite off the top of my head the entire SLAAC process for obtaining ipv6 addresses. i should not need to know what a ipv6 is to have a modern network in my home.

i could spin up any current linux distro and have it serving "Welcome to NGINX!" over HTTPS within an hour or two. i should not need to know what any of that means to put a webpage on the internet.

i can configure and tune ZFS for optimal performance given a particular usecase, and make sure everything is setup correctly to support extended permissions, regular backup replications, and scheduled healthchecks. all i wanted was to share a folder across my computers.

the amount of work, knowledge and time needed to go from "I want X" to "I have X" in the selfhosting space is, by any measure to the average human, absolutely incomprehensible. if you want to be able to selfhost anything at all, there's a whole bunch of simplifications you need to unlearn to get anywhere at all ("wait, what do you mean all my computers have their own ip address? i thought i only had one?"). and if you want to be able to do it well??? lol. lmao, even. get ready to spend months of your life understanding every single little gotcha about how computers work just so that you can have your own little fediverse presence or whatever.

i'm an outlier. i enjoy this learning process. i think it's fun. i also have the time to put into it, and access to resources that allow me to learn about it. most people online don't. telling them to "just selfhost" as a panacea to all their social media woes is like saying "just learn how the endocrine system works" to a trans person who just wants access to HRT so they can stop feeling like shit.

yes, selfhosting is ideal. it helps us reduce our dependence on predatory, capitalistic monoliths that have all but monopolized the internet as it stands today, and gives us some leverage over them when they threaten to beat us to death with said monopoly. but in the current state of things, selfhosting is not a viable solution for everyone. there's astronomical amounts of work we need to do to de-shittify everything to a point where most people can even begin to have a chance of understanding what's going on, and we can't just tell people to selfhost until we fix that.

do i have the solutions? maybe. i've been thinking about this problem for a while (sneak peek: reimagine the router). but that's a whole ass post for another chost, this one's already getting long enough as is. and i think i've made my central point crystal fucking clear at this point anyways.