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?
For NAT and SSL, you don’t need to fiddle with those directly. You can use Wireguard for routing and encryption. For personal use I tend to host my servers as Tor hidden services which gives them routing, encryption, and anonymity. Client side SSL certificates are also something people underestimate here; you can use those for simultaneous encryption and authentication.
Outgoing email can be hard, but since you control the sender and the receiver, you don’t need to go through the public internet’s spam filters. You don’t even necessarily need to use SMTP, you can just drop the files in the maildir and sync that across the systems.