Nothing stops them, but that’d be fine. If they buy the hardware they should be able to do what they want with it.

Okay, fair enough, any thoughts on what a good ‘management service’ might look like?

Is that just a dig on TrueNAS, or is it just a particularly daunting hill in the march up the difficulty curve?

Thanks, yeah, there’s a lot of work for us to do in testing hardware and understanding what a common workload (if such a thing exists) would need.

Do you have any particular evidence that causes you to think the audience would be niche or wouldn’t want to pay subscriptions? I can understand if this is just an opinion you hold, but if there’s data or experience behind it, that would be good to know.

But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital

It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group.

I’m not confident that simple democracy is enough. While I do expect that a one-worker-one-vote system would make it harder to sell out, it’s still possible. I do think that a cooperative has many benefits. I just want to make it fatal to the business to go down certain dark paths: selling user data, seller user compute, selling user attention, etc.

I wish there were more examples of functional high-tech cooperatives I could learn lessons from.

If I were to start a firm today, I’d be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I’d like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren’t the dumb kids.

I strongly agree with this sentiment.

If we did, would you be comfortable giving the company a root SSH login to manage your system, or would you prefer a more limited method of access?

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

Not at all, I found your comment insightful. What you’re describing to me sounds more like a business of consulting with people rather than getting access to a knowledge base. One of the things I’m curious to learn is if there is a body of people out there that give up with self-hosting because they don’t want to learn everything, but just want to create something that works, and our resource are optimized for training professionals.

There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

Agreed, it would need to be very clear, and additionally we’d need to plan that a certain percentage of customers would grow out of a basic support offering, either by becoming experts or by growing their install size and complexity.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal.

Understandable. Is there a price you think would be reasonable? What would you want for that price?

Although any commercial business will be dead or the new problem to avoid in 15 years.

This sounds like an interesting point, could you expand it a bit? Are you saying that there’s no way this kind of business will last that long, or if it does it’ll become something bad?

Would you rather pay a higher price per single instance ($100 to fix something you broke on accident) or pay a lower constant price ($10-$20/month) like insurance?

Would you rather get help in the form of a conversation, a custom script someone wrote for you, or by giving admin access to the company to directly fix things?

Isn’t that basically just a commercial NAS?

Is it? I haven’t bought one, nor have I built a TrueNAS box. I’ve heard from folks that run applications on a NAS, particularly VMs and containers, but my understanding is that your price-per-unit-compute is really high since that’s not what it’s optimized for. I’ve got an old Zyxel NAS, it’s quite low-end, and I can’t run anything beyond NFS/Samba/audio streaming.

you can just plug the NAS in anywhere and you’re golden.

Do they have some kind of VPN or TURN system? I’m expecting that customers will want to access the device outside of their LAN.

For me, a tiny x86 server isn’t going to cut it, because I want a beefier CPU to run CI/CD for my programming projects, so a beefier, modern CPU is quite valuable

How beefy? Multiple CPU? If you could buy 4 boxes and have them load balance would that be interesting, or do you have a strong preference for single-box compute?

I could absolutely be wrong here, that’s just my $0.02.

Thanks, your $0.02 is exactly what I’m looking for!

Do you already have an idea of what kinds of things you’d want to run on it?

I’m not aware of a script alone that could do it, assuming you bought some hardware that came with Windows and wanted to run Linux. Is it possible these days to install Linux from within Windows? I’ve been flashing via disks for too long now.

I do know that some routers are scriptable, but not all routers are, so it may not be possible to do things like expose a port on the Internet with just scripts on whatever router they have.

These are great points, and I fully agree. I’d be interested in knowing what kind of license or corporate structure or contract would give you confidence that the organization is worth investing in. I could put all the software out with a really strong Affero license so that you’ve got the source code, but I get the impression that you, like me, want more than that. Corporations like Mondragon are interesting to me, and I’m aware of a few different tech cooperative organizations. I’m not confident that a cooperative structure alone is enough. Yes, it helps avoid the company taking VC money, shooting for the moon, failing, and then selling everything that’s not clearly legally radioactive. But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital and adjusting the EULA every few months until they have the right to sell off your baby photos.

I’ve been batting around the idea of creating a compliment to the “end-user license agreement” - the “originating company license agreement”. Something like a poison pill that forces the company to pay out to customers in the event of a data breach, sale of customer data, or other events that a would-be acquirer may think is worth it for them.

I’m just not sure yet what kinds of controls would be strong enough to convince people who have been burned by this sort of thing in the past. What do you think?

What kind of workload do you run that makes you confident you need that much hardware? Do you think people just beginning could get buy on 4 cores and 8 GB RAM for a while? How long before you think most people need more?

That’s an interesting idea I hadn’t thought much about. I’ve been more focused on individuals than organizations. Do you have experience with tax-funded institutions? I assumed they generally have strict procurement rules and long support contracts with large established players by policy.

Good point, I should have mentioned the plan is to sell support.

this price point is not realistic even for used equipment, not including RAM or storage

I’m doing experiments currently on a refurbished Intel i5-6500 with 8Gb DDR4 and a 0.5Tb SSD. It’s tiny, quiet (~45 decibels) and so far runs ~8 watts idle, 25 watts normal usage. I haven’t stress-tested the power draw. The router I’m testing with is a Mikrotik hEX lite 5. That’s around ~$150, though clearly if you are accustomed to more “rack-mount” style homelab these will seem very modest.

What I’m testing for now is getting representative loads on the devices to see how they perform.

I’m not really sure what value add you are bringing to the table that one wouldn’t get from just buying used hardware from an office surplus and if one is very inexperienced in self-hostong, looking into something like LTT is partnered with like Hexos.

Oh, I totally agree, my value add just isn’t there if you are experienced at hosting. The value add is to help people get started, and to keep them running at a modest level. Not everyone wants to experiment with Kubernetes at home or train LLMs. Some folks just want a password manager, a shared calendar, something to organize their tax documents, a pihole, and a Minecraft server for their kids.

I don’t follow LTT, I was under the impression it was more hardware reviews for the experienced than tutorials to help people get started.

I’ve read a bit about Hexos, I’m thinking of some similar things, and it would make sense to work with them. I’m excited for their coming beta.

What is the aim? People who want to get into it, but does not know how, or experts? Think half of the attraction of selfhosting is the diy aspect.

I don’t disagree, and I would imagine what I’m offering would only be useful to people who are very early and don’t yet know they enjoy the DIY aspect.

The aim, though, is this: I’ve enjoyed self-hosting. It’s given me some powers that most people don’t get to have who aren’t also technical professionals. I’m also deeply frustrated by the environment created by the various major tech companies. If I can, I’d like to lower the barrier for people to get some of those powers without having to become experts and to make it more feasible for them to do what they want to do, rather than just what they are permitted to do.

What extra would this bring if people can just buy the parts cheaper?

Much shorter time going from “how can I control some of my own data” to "I’m running NextCloud, and its kinda like iCloud/Google Drive/Whatever Microsoft does and it’s running right here under my control! Not everyone knows the path from buying parts online to having a working reverse-proxy and reasonable firewall rules. Also, standardization makes it much easier to support people, which is really what the business would be doing.

why would this be better than, let’s say a beestation?

I knew about Synology, but as a NAS product, which assumes a certain familiarity with backup schemes, etc. Kind of a prosumer-only thing. The Beestation is new to me, thanks for the tip. Quite possible what I’m proposing would have some overlap and compete with it, I’ll have to read up on it.

I assume “SFF PC” means “Small form-factor personal computer”.

The value add is not having to make a large number of technical decisions. IPv4 vs v6, which firewall rules to use, port-forwarding vs DMZ, flavor of Linux, partition scheme, filesystem type, application packaging system, and on and on. For many people they don’t care about these decisions, they want “to put something on the Internet” and do it safely. While safety isn’t a binary, and engineering is full of tradeoffs, an experienced practitioner can answer many of these questions reflexively and come out with good enough answers for some customers.

In the end the customer should be able to dig in and change whatever they want. But I want to see if flipping the decision dependency around will help. IE, start with stuff that works, then change things, rather than start with parts and make all the decisions before anything works.