this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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This is my most heartfelt advice: do not do hosting for family members. You will get no end of trouble.
Find her a commercial service she can trust. Or throw up your hands and go “big tech, what can you do”. But do not, under any circumstance, run her IT.
I made this mistake and hosted my mom's webpage and email.
Anytime anything happened, she was on the phone to me complaining about how horrible it all was.
Email bounced because she got the address wrong? My fault. All the spam she got? My fault. Images were the wrong size on her webpage? My fault. Typo in a PDF she was sending to a client? My email server must have messed it up.
I could continue, but jesus christ, it was a disaster.
Never, ever, ever, ever host for family members unless you're willing to put up with that kind of shit, because that's what always happens.
+1, this is poised to create issues and potentially ruin a few relationships.
OP's sister is used to Apple services and not even other payed cloud services come close to the level of integration Apple provides. It just works, is a real thing inside the Apple ecosystem and anything the OP might get will be inferior and she will complain.
On the day the service is down or something doesn't work / some update breaks the sync or wtv she'll just be there with an "entitled atitude" pressuring the OP to fix things.
This is like one of those situations where you have a LOT of work setting up and managing something and people will never recognize the work, help, split the bill or be patient. People are so expected tech to "just click a button" and everything just works and is free that they aren't even able to understand the complexity of what's behind it all and the amount of work it is required to get "a simple file sync" to work.
Yep. I don't recommend shit anymore to family members because it's either:
a) not what they want (the proprietary service was better)
b) you will be doing damage control for the rest of your life
I don't know. I run a Nextcloud instance for myself and I let my gf tag along. Why do you think people shouldn't help their families out?
I definitely think they should help their families out. Helping them select an alternative service is helping out.
Being on the hook for endless tech support while getting blamed for everything is not helping out. It’s also not healthy for your relationship with your sibling, and it’s not a good use of family holiday time.
A partner is different. You already share a lot of infra, and since you presumably spend a lot more time together it’s not likely to impact your relationship as much unless you go full Pat & Mat do IT.
I think this sums it up nicely.
The comment you replied to is a direct reply to the comment you linked - I don't think it was intentional, but if it was, then I'd like to say it's not a very helpful reply as OP already read it.
Sad that people with the knowledge won't even consider the great opportunity it is to teach that knowledge to a family member.
If they want to learn how to run their own stuff, go ahead and teach them.
Do you think sister here wants to learn how to run nextcloud?
She might want to, who knows?
She wants privacy, maybe she's not afraid of learning new things to get it. It is possible.
She's in medicine and psychology, big brain but full with other things.
So it could take some time to teach her.
@Navigator @vzq That should probably be the first question then
It isn't because he needs to be willing to teach in the first place. If a person don't want to teach autonomy to another, the debate ends here.
But to know if you want to take the time to teach someone, you have to consider the possibility in the first place not thinking 'impossible' then move along.
Also we can debate on how to teach a family member without being overwhelmed, because it is a real topic of discussion.
As I am teaching myself right now maintainable selfhost setups using popular apps (admittedly with Kubernetes vs something minimal in functionality like Docker Desktop), there is a lot of complexity involved in getting these services both functional and maintainable while also having to consider the security implications of various setups.
While I agree the concept of self-host is a good thing to advocate, I think the complexity and difficulty involved not just to do it, but to do it right is going to be a straight cliff of a learning curve for those not already technically inclined in databases, networking, and filesystems/block storage.
Honestly, taking the burden of being IT for a reasonable subscription cost for your efforts is a better way to go, especially if the setup allows for expanding your offerings to other members in a localized community.
Which is why i'm planning around my setup for two years already (some of the fancy nice-to-haves are stale again already) and am going the route of minimal yet pragmatic toolset because i did learn that stuff but didn't do the graduation (am dev now) and the bigger tools are more rigide in how to do it and break more often.
And yeah, sharing my selfhost was low on the list already.