Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era.
>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998
My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.
But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.
A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.
I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.
All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.
If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.
My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.
1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc."
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
""Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad."
Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology
Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs
If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead
If no, then why is "hosting" the term used
This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification
I'm surprised people are advocating self-hosting as a viable solution. It takes a lot of knowledge to do sync and backup yourself, most of it implicit knowledge that people here don't realize we have and so for us it seems very easy.
There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it are simple (edit a couple text files, run a couple commands), but half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work. Cloud succeeded because cloud is easy (at least in the beginning), it's that simple.
If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough for the average 7-8 year old to do it without struggling. One promising way forward is with local-first E2EE sync and backup. The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync, which has a UX that I adore, and hope to see more of in the future. There's other good options too, but none that I'd feel comfortable trusting a seven-year-old to execute correctly first try.
The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
I've taken to buying the occasional CD and DVD. While I still use spotify more than physical cds, I still have my old CD collection and the sound quality is so refreshing. And soundtracks aren't on Spotify. With movies it's hard to rewatch favourites because they don't stay on the streaming services. Again it's much more satisfying to own them yourself.
I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
17 years on, no value created, trillions extracted and used for stock buybacks. Destabilizing the economy, raising borrowing costs and making the feds print print print. In the 90s there were 8000+ publicly listed companies doing real business. Now there are ~3600, 10 years from now there will be at most 1000.
Gambling and endless consolidation feel good for monkey brains. Governments are supposed to step in, but we have a heckin' Cheeto in the White House.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
The reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
111 comments
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
You never go full cloud.
I guess I'm just old though.
>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998
My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.
But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.
A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.
I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.
All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.
If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.
My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.
He wouldn't have paid for it either way, or would have either way due to taxes and how a lot of libraries work.
And it wouldn't have taken anything away from the library itself or other library customers.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
We're old.
A lot of HNers weren't born yet.
> and who's not a dev/sysadmin
> He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology
Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs
If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead
If no, then why is "hosting" the term used
This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification
The traffic on every social media is increasing.
There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop”
Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer
This sounds like a filter bubble plus wishful thinking. Most people can barely manage their phone settings, let alone run a homelab.
There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it are simple (edit a couple text files, run a couple commands), but half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work. Cloud succeeded because cloud is easy (at least in the beginning), it's that simple.
If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough for the average 7-8 year old to do it without struggling. One promising way forward is with local-first E2EE sync and backup. The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync, which has a UX that I adore, and hope to see more of in the future. There's other good options too, but none that I'd feel comfortable trusting a seven-year-old to execute correctly first try.
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Gambling and endless consolidation feel good for monkey brains. Governments are supposed to step in, but we have a heckin' Cheeto in the White House.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this:
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.