My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.

I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.

Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.

We still need a lot of plug and Play with home servers.

In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.

In theory

I’d like a turnkey k3s and a 10” rack designed for consumers. Set up to host your Minecraft server, store your media, and be incrementally upgradeable.

This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.

I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.

Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.

I'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter and her friends. They are craving old school offline experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and relatives old music collections, cruising second hand shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they are checking out each other's household book and music collections.

She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.

I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.

My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.

That's cool to hear. I fear it's not the main trend, but it's comforting somewhat.

Gamers are the ones building PCs by hand. They have the skills, it’s a matter of motivation.

Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly overclocking their gear without frying it or making the system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI according to a youtube tutorial anyway).

The software and security aspects of running a server are far more consequential and complex.

"dad jeans" ?

Outdated looking jeans that are a light-ish wash with an unflattering cut more designed for comfort and price rather than style or for rugged work.

Though the term has recently been adopted by a trend in women’s jeans that don’t really resemble their namesake.

The connotation being that they’re outdated, uncool, and dorky.

Yeah, that trend came up in search, hence my confusion. Thanks.

I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.

I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

> I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.

Immich feels too heavy for my needs, so I wrote a single executable server that turns my photo directories into a photo gallery (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-gallery)

Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my phone.

You might be shocked. Immich is amazing.

Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.

Once you include internet latency hard drive latency isn’t that much worse. It won’t help but it won’t stop it.

Hard disk drive prices are also soaring. Looking up a random WD drive: up 70% since July, a Seagate drive, up 50%

For $125, which is also about the price of one year of cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to store half a million photos and also back up a million photos. It probably won't ever go over $200.

And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.

Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.

Yes, you need two hard drives. If you’re really paranoid, use three.

That was already covered in my top level comment though. Geographic redundancy not local mirroring.

Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group. If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few days that isn't a big deal.

I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.

I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>