7 ms·

Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946 https://news.ycombinator.co

by apitman 10d ago

Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946 In that time I started a domain registrar, a free OpenID Connect login service (https://lastlogin.net/ https://lastlogin.net/), created the de facto list of tunneling tools (https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling), and built a couple of my own tunneling tools (SirTunnel and boringproxy), all to try and make self hosting easier. I'm still trying to solve this problem. Some progress has been made (mostly by other projects), but we're still not there. FWIW, I used to think everyone owning a domain was the way forward. I now suspect otherwise. Domains are too expensive (especially most TLDs outside .com/.net/.org) and the costs of accidentally forgetting to renew are catastrophic. Domains just aren't a consumer product. I think you only need a domain if you want a permanent public web presence, and I don't think most people need that. Most people just need a better/faster/private google drive, google photos, google docs, etc, and for that it's ok if your domain changes once in a while. So I think free subdomains set up without vendor lockin are probably the ticket. If anyone is interested in collaborating in this space, definitely reach out.

tarasglek 10d ago
Interested, I've lastlogin, working on simplifying this space too
iFreilicht 9d ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment and have thought a lot about how I would solve these problems. Considered founding a startup as well, but the market size is very unclear. I would say in theory, cloud-in-a-bottle already comes quite far. The only thing missing is another tier where imbue only provides you with a domain and a reverse-proxy so your home-server is reachable. Of course, their software would then also habe to manage the whole certificate lifecycle and DNS-challenge, but if it did, then you can have your server at home and not have to worry about how it manages to be reachable from the internet. However, if I'm understanding you correctly, a solution like this would also be too much vendor lock-in for you, correct? If so, how independent do you wanna go? I think especially if you want people to be able to self-host from home, you will always need some proxy in the cloud. Or are you considering a DDNS setup?

by apitman 10d ago

tarasglek 10d ago

Interested, I've lastlogin, working on simplifying this space too

iFreilicht 9d ago

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment and have thought a lot about how I would solve these problems. Considered founding a startup as well, but the market size is very unclear. I would say in theory, cloud-in-a-bottle already comes quite far. The only thing missing is another tier where imbue only provides you with a domain and a reverse-proxy so your home-server is reachable. Of course, their software would then also habe to manage the whole certificate lifecycle and DNS-challenge, but if it did, then you can have your server at home and not have to worry about how it manages to be reachable from the internet. However, if I'm understanding you correctly, a solution like this would also be too much vendor lock-in for you, correct? If so, how independent do you wanna go? I think especially if you want people to be able to self-host from home, you will always need some proxy in the cloud. Or are you considering a DDNS setup?