Right, the services should allow federation, but that doesn't mean you need to federate with the entire world. You and your friend should be able to just click "invite" in your "My Home" app to get a link to text to each other like `myhome://invite?domain=<random>.services.frienddomain.com`. Under that TLD you have well-known subdomains and TXT records for e.g. wireguard config, oauth server location, etc. When you open the link in your "My Home" app, it adds the wireguard peer and starts trying to perform oauth client autoregistration and federate any services you run. When your friend clicks your link, it'll set up the other half of those connections. Once you've both clicked, things start talking to each other. This all stays invisible to the normal Internet for anyone that doesn't know the root domain to search for records under.
This could all run on one of those $130 N150 minipcs that uses like 8W and could run 24/7. It's a lot of integration work, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a fairly off-the-shelf product.
Re:The Future Is Not Self-Hosted
by drew_lytle on Saturday July 26, 2025 @07:40AM
(#44693302)
Sounds complicated, but cool! Thanks for your comment!
Totally agree, but there's a lot more nuance here. Giving each friend an account on my server would require it be exposed to the public internet which is difficult to manage securely. And SSO doesn't really make this very convenient because that means everyone would have to sign in and sync to everyone's servers which is a lot of work for the user. It's a UX problem.
The solution as I see it here is services that can interoperate and sync files across hosts. So, my friend's Alice and Bob can both have their photos synced to a separate server and can choose which photos to share to my server. Separate but connected.
Thanks for reading and for your comment!