Sorry if I’m mistaken on this, but I’m still new to self-hosting.
Currently I use SyncThing and I love it. My files are accessible to me wherever I am in the world, and it costs me nothing.
I’d like to move more of my life to self-hosted servers. I’m looking at leaving Spotify for Funkwhale. But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.
Why is that? Is there a way to make my costs 0, the way they are with SyncThing?
Perfect explanation. This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche. People like paying for convenience.
Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.
Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.
Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.
There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.
Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.