I’ve seen a lot of people saying things that amount to “those tech nerds need to understand that nobody wants to use the command line!”, but I don’t actually think that’s the hardest part of self-hosting today. I mean, even with a really slick GUI like ASUSTOR NASes provide, getting a reliable, non-NATed connection, with an SSL certificate, some kind of basic DDOS protection, backups, and working outgoing email (ugh), is a huge pain in the ass.
Am I wrong? Would a Sandstorm-like GUI for deploying Docker images solve all of our problems? What can we do to reshape the network such that people can more easily run their own stuff?
One-click would definitely lower the bar to entry but I have to admit the concept makes me uncomfortable. While it could eliminate those problems, it creates the issue of thousands of new server administrators who really don’t understand the platform that they are now responsible for. Infrastructure and security IS hard because it’s not just about getting the right syntax, it’s understanding the concepts so that not only does it work, it works safely and reliably.
I’ve seen quite a bit of bad troubleshooting going on as newcomers have sought to set up their instances. It doesn’t help that the current docker-compose in the Lemmy repository is outdated and doesn’t work out of the box. More than a few “this worked for me” solutions that I’ve seen may have gotten things working, but broke fundamental security principles that may or may not come back to bite the administrators later.