There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called “Opera Unite”. It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called “the fridge” where people could leave you post it notes.
They’d give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they’d proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.
In the late 2000s, Opera had a very interesting product called “Opera Unite”. It was essentially a self-hosting platform built into the web browser. You could use it to chat, host a website, share photos, share files (and let other people share files with you), and a few other things. It had a guest book called “the fridge” where people could leave you post it notes.
They’d give you a subdomain which would either connect to it directly (if your network allows UPnP or you forwarded the port), otherwise they’d proxy it via their servers.
Basically, it was a super simple solution to create a decentralized web. The goal was to let everyone own their own data in a way that anyone could understand, without having to know anything about server hosting. Instead of just browsing the web, you could contribute to it at the same time.
It worked surprisingly well, but never caught on with the general public, and they killed it off about three years later.