I was browsing Hacker News the other day and came across an article titled "The future is not self-hosted" by Drew Lyton. After reading it, I felt inspired to write this post.
You can check out his article here:
In summary, he argues that self-hosting isn't a sustainable solution for everyone due to its technical complexity. He also suggests that having lots of isolated and independent systems is not a viable solution. Instead, he believes the future is more likely to be based on community-funded services that are accessible to everyone.
I really enjoyed his post and its idea, but as you might guess from this post's title, I don't entirely agree with the idea of "community-funded" as the solution. I believe our future is more likely to be federated. Let's explore why.
What Is Federation?
First we need to understand the terms federation and fediverse. If you already use platforms like Mastodon, SwiftKey, Pixelfed, or Lemmy, you're probably familiar with this concept. But if you're not, let me explain.
A federation, in as it’s meaning, is a system where power is divided between a central authority and smaller authorities, like states. They are separated in power, but they all operate as one unified country.
The concept isn't much different in the Fediverse. It's a collection of separate servers, located in different places and sometimes running different programs. However, they are all connected to each other and act as one large platform, which is called the Fediverse. The best part is that the Fediverse is completely decentralized.
Just like email, anyone with a public domain and a server can spin up their own Fediverse server and join the network.
I believe this is how the internet should have been from the start. From its foundation, the internet was designed to be a decentralized network an interconnected system where everyone can connect without a central point of control. The best example of this is the invention of email back in the 1970s.
But this changed as today's big tech companies grew to a point where they began to centralize our decentralized network around their platforms.
It’s not just about platforms, either. When they started building and owning their data centers worldwide, they also began to manage your data, not just on their platforms, but also on other platforms that use their data centers.
This is why we, as individuals, prefer to self-host our own services at home. Even though it requires technical knowledge, probably costs more than an average cloud storage provider, and sometimes results in a worse experience, you still own the data inside that server. No one other than you can access it, unless you want them to.
And while self-hosting fixes some problems, it also creates many of its own. I believe that having a community-funded service isn't going to fix all of them. For example, having my data on a community-funded cloud storage service won't resolve my concerns. In the end, that data is still uploaded to a remote server that I have no control over.
The Federated Solution
You may be asking what solution I have. And my solution is federated platforms.
With a federated platform, you gain the freedom to select where your data will be stored. This could be a community-funded server or your trusty home server. No matter the location of the data, everyone will be able to connect with everyone across every server because the federated platform functions as one giant network.
The best example of this is Mastodon. I believe Mastodon owes its current success to its ActivityPub protocol, which is the engine behind its federation. This federation connects over 10 million users across 30,000 servers in one big federated network.
And now, more open-source projects have started to implement their own federation protocols.
For example, there is ongoing development for federation with Forgejo, a self-hosted GitHub alternative that powers the Codeberg.
Additionally Nextcloud which is a self-hosted cloud storage platform, has started rolling out features related to federation. When they released Nextcloud Hub 8 back in April 2024, they gave us the ability to share files with people on other servers without ever leaving it. And with the release of Nextcloud Hub 9, we gained the ability to chat and video conference with them using the built-in Nextcloud Talk app.
These are just a few examples I know of, but after a quick DuckDuckGo search, I saw a growing number of apps and platforms that support federation, and that made me excited.
I believe our future is federated. The increasing push of AI from big tech will drive more people toward community-backed projects or self-hosting their applications. And just like with Mastodon, people will prefer the platform that gives them the most freedom possible.
That freedom, of course is federation.
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Thank You!
19.08.2025