The closest to your dream is probably hexos.com/

It is closed source, but build on top of open source...

They (for now) have a one time purchase license, no subscription.

It has buddy backups. Can run on any normal x86 pc / server (you have to bring your own and install hexos to it). And has a nice and simple GUI for deploying services easily.

I never personally used it. I just have it on my radar. For me, the not so easy but fully free (cost) and open source way works reasonably well. I run my homelab with dokploy.

My problem with chains of trust is the Kevin Bacon problem. Sure, I trust my friends, but some of their friends can be a little sketchy. Plus, they don't have any direct social contact with me, nor any personal consequences for betrayal. And nevermind the sketchy friends of the sketchy friends.

Federation has its uses, but trust is not one of them.

This is my dream as well, but for security I feel like you need multiple independent systems. I’m doing mine with power-hungry recycled 2012-vintage server hardware (Xeon E5-1620s and 2620s and Opteron 6276s, bought for $100 each several years ago, plus a few hundred more to their maximum amounts of DDR3 ECC) but this hypothetical box could easily have raspberry pis or something similar. Public services can become compromised and you’ll only want certain hardware to be trusted to do certain things.

My plan is a terrible one and I’m taking way too long to do it. I really want someone else to build this better and faster, but if my crappy plan ends up being the first usable version of this, that will suck but at least it’s available.

I had a dumb personal domain from June of 2000, tried to make it a public internet site, offered services to people on IRC for internet social points, but after a few years it got ahead of me and I let it die. (I’ve been paying for the same business internet ever since, though, and I still have the same static IPs as from back then.) Time passed, got married, got a computer science degree and a development job with a billion dollar SAAS company.

I can see how they do big public internet hosting. I want everyone to be able to do this, too. Been trying to build the same kinds of architecture with open source tools at home. Struggling, I keep over designing it and getting stuck and frustrated. It takes me a month to do what a competent ops person from work does in a couple days.

OnceI have this working for me, I can share it, because it’s my own work product. It’ll be a guide, a recipe to follow, for creating the kind of secure and isolated web application and general VM hosting environment I see us use at work. This stuff is the difference between “I’m hosting one thing and if it gets hacked, everything is owned” and “I’m hosting a hundred things, all different, and if one gets hacked that will suck - but the other 99 things will stay safe.”

Biggest problem I think with creating this with open-source is just picking a direction for everything and getting the internet to not pitch a fit. “Why did you use postfix?” “I hate Greenbone / GSA and refuse to use it.” “Hardware is expensive, you say I need a jump box for this AND for this, and dedicated hardware for a firewall here AND here? Each of those could clearly be a VM. Your project wastes hardware and I’m not doing it this way.”

Sure, once this is done these decisions are pretty much baked in and I won’t have the energy to redo them yet again. But getting the architecture perfectly designed for your exact scenario … that takes a ton of work. Big companies pay a ton of money in just payroll hours to build this kind of thing bespoke for their needs. I’ll be giving away my version, and I’m afraid the internet won’t care.

But I think we need to keep this ability alive, that private citizens can set up their own DIY hosting that can stand up to hostile internet actors decently well. They can pay (I’ll grant) exploitative rates for business internet connections so they can have static IPs at home as well. If we all stop, we all just decide all hosting should be done by big cloud service companies or big enterprises, we lose a crucial bit of internet freedom. Someone needs to say “yeah this is kinda dumb but I’m doing it anyway.”

And if they could do it with a box you just plug in, instead of my (likely) month-long two hundred step recipe, and still have it stand up to attacks and “Internet background radiation” and stuff, that would be epic. I kind of don’t want my thing to be the way that self-hosting-public-web-services is done.

I feel this in my bones. I was an English major in college. Now I’m in my late 40s and want to create my ow server so that I can OWN the things I used to own: baby pictures and family photos, movies that I bought, music that I bought. I want to send letters to friends without Amazon, JC Penny and Google knowing what I put in my letter.

I’m starting on my home networking journey. I have a beeline on the way to build my own router…pfSense, OpenSense, OpenWRT…still chewing on that but I’m going to do it.

Fuck it. My dad used to work on his car, I think this is my generation’s equivalent.

I share this pipe dream. Increased awareness of and access to self-hosted services encourages decentralization, reduces our reliance on massive data centers, and empowers the public to own their data. For the hobbyist, I think this is already in reach.

However, in order for such a system to succeed in the wider market, it needs to also be cheap and convenient. Even a Raspberry Pi goes for around $80 these days, and storage is becoming more expensive by the day thanks to AI companies. iCloud storage is only 99 cents a month. If, for example, ISPs were to bundle this software and storage with their modem hardware, it could happen. Hell, they could even charge a small fee to provide you with a publicly accesible domain.

If I were a younger man, I've always wanted to produce a 'server in a box'. Something small, powerful, capable, came with a plethora of click to deploy apps, in an environment that would be conducive with the average homeowner's computer savvy or lack there of. I've seen a lot of mini-racks made with Lenovo ThinkCenters that really look good, could fit on a shelf in a closet and serve the household with privacy respecting software.

But I'm far from being a younger man, so one of you guys take the lead and make a million $$.