Why GitHub?

Posted Jul 31, 2025 4:59 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: Why GitHub? by ballombe
Parent article: We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund (GitHub blog)

The only sovereign code hosting is self-hosting, folks should just switch to that instead.

Why GitHub?

Posted Jul 31, 2025 21:32 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (5 responses)

Exactly! The EU tech fund could contribute to make self-hosting easier.

Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 1, 2025 1:38 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (4 responses)

How would you do that? For self-hosting it seems that what is needed isn't funding, but that regulation of ISPs would be the main thing that could improve the ability to self-host, at least for HTTP based services. Something like moving to fibre, router freedom, no charges for static IPs, require support for customer-owned ASNs, BGP etc. Once you have all those things, port forwarding to any computer with any of the git tools in a docker container should be good enough for many folks?

https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/

Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 1, 2025 4:24 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think static IPs are an issue with self-hosting. You can get them from most ISPs as a paid option.

The main complexity is in setting infrastructure in such a way that it won't need a lot of constant tinkering. HomeAssistant is a great example of such a product.

Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 13:46 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

NextCloud seems an example too, although I haven't used it to confirm. The destruction of Cobalt by infighting at Sun is something I still think about, how things could be different if people started their Internet experience with self-hosted mail/web/filesharing or more small business was self-hosted such that expertise was more widely distributed. Would that have resulted in a slow-down of consolidation and big tech hosting, social media, if the Internet was more anarchic/democratic and less centralized/hierarchical?

Maybe the fact that no other startup picked up the pieces that Cobalt put together and made their own self-hosting appliance means that the idea didn't actually have as much weight behind it as I'd like, but it seemed relatively popular at the time, so it feels like it could have kick-started an ecosystem that would have changed the development of the Internet.

Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 14:07 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I remember when appliances were all the rage, in the late 90s-early 2000s. But most people and companies don't particularly like being responsible for hardware, and most software providers like recurring revenue. Both of those things conspired to move people onto the cloud.

I self-host everything, but not all of it at my house. I have a couple of cheap KVM instances at hosting providers; these are my public-facing machines. And the hosting providers have backup power, DDoS countermeasures, etc. that would be far too expensive/difficult for me to provide.

Then I run my actual IMAP server, phone system, etc. at home. These services are accessible only on my LAN or over a VPN.

But you have to have a certain tinkering mindset to want to do this stuff. I enjoy it, but most people probably don't. 🙂

Self-hosting barriers?

Posted Aug 6, 2025 8:44 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Strictly speaking fully Self-hosting isn't needed to leave Github and dependence on US companies, you can just use any webserver at a hosting provider in the EU, it's probably like 3 bucks a month or something like that.