You know there are 12 year olds who run their own minecraft servers, right?

I wouldn't call them sophisticated admins, and I wouldn't trust them with anything mission critical, but the servers often work.

There's plenty of simple webservers around. I used to use one at school that was a single (likely self-extracting zip) exe file that ran Apache on the given port; the document root was configurable, but defaulted to the relative path ./public_html. I would be surprised if there isn't a project somewhere that's effectively a QT gui to start a Python webserver like this[1], as a single self-contained exe file.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44586441/ddg#44586701

You are severely underestimating people.

Reading this thread - exactly my thoughts too. Most people (if given the incentive and interest) would understand systemd just fine. Some effort would be needed.

It would take one hell of an incentive to make someone with

* No previous tech knowledge

* A full-time job

* No external help

learn systemd, or how to setup and maintain a web server, or whatever. Individuals may still self-host of course, but I'm skeptical people will do it en masse anytime soon. After all, if the entry barrier weren't so high, we wouldn't have an entire service industry that does this for you (SquareSpace, Wix, Substack...)

I think most of the people on r/selfhosted aren't super technical. Lots of them install a snap or docker container with a web UI for self hosting and they are off to the races.

Looking at the /r/selfhosted crowd comes with some serious survivorship bias though. It's not considering the (potentially large) group of people who would like to self-host, but don't even make it to /r/selfhosted or similar forums.

Sure, but let's be real, if your going to slef host you'll need to be able to do a bit of that.

Would be nice if there were more little appliances that handle stuff like this so someone could just buy it at best buy or whatever and plug it in next to the router.

> What “lay person” is going to install a web server??? That’s insane.

You ... might be surprised.

I've come to recognize my view that "anyone could install this web server" is a view most commonly shared among fellow techies, and not one shared by the greater population.

Yeah. Of course not 'everyone' will be able to, and maybe that's what we should be considering the 'lay person' now...

But there is a wide range of knowledge in this space. A 'lay person' is kind of hard to get down to a spot without potentially lumping people together improperly.

Take my customer for example. She's not stupid. She knows she could probably fix the computer I am fixing for her, herself. But she also knows there are things she just doesn't know and probably should get someone else who does know those things to do it instead. Is she the lay person? From talking to her, I am pretty sure with a couple quick hours of reading some stuff, she could probably set up a basic Nginx server or something very easily for herself. Etc, etc. Yet, by others standards, she is a lay person because she can't utilize Apache or AWS.

So, yeah... that's my take on it.

I totally started there, knowing a lot of stuff was in my reach but would take some reading to succeed with. It's still hard for me to anticipate who will persist and who will throw their hands up and declare they aren't technical.

Yeah, you could say I am even still 'there' to some degree. Sure, I fix computers for people, but that's kinda easy. I know enough to know when to not do something, essentially. And that can be hellishly important as a skill.

But the fact remains that I have a A+ book from Comptia left unread that I found at a 2nd hand store, a book on Bash that I found at a bar also unread, and a book on Python from O'reily via Amazon; yes, unread. All of them unread.

Why? I dunno. Can't be damned to? I taught myself pretty much everything I know through trial and error. If I want something in a program to do something else, I alter the code and reverse engineer it until it does what I want. This is how I make mods for games usually, when I tinker at all. How do I know what to tinker with? I read, ironically. Yeah, I know. Go figure, right?

But still, those books lay unread in a desk next to me as I type this.

So what am I reading? Well, it's quite simple. If I ever get to a point where my own intuition or knowledge isn't good enough, and I don't see the answer staring me in the face via some comments in the code, or some error code thing, etc, etc...

I google it.