this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026

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[META] No man is an island (aussie.zone)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Re: the recent meta discussion and ongoing chats about self hosting, open vs closed source, AI etc, I wanted to share some food for thought.

I'll explain why this is related to self hosting at the bottom (section bolded): our lovely new mods can call it. I hope it inspires some out loud thinking.

Disclosure: I am not the content creator nor am I paid by them to signal boost. I just like their stuff and think this is an important topic, from multiple angles.

"The future of AI depends on the moral compass of five people."

I've been watching "AI in context" for a few weeks (they make long form biopic content on current state of AI - really good stuff).

This dropped today; it's about the wheeling and dealing behind closed doors at OpenAI re: Sam Altman's firing. It's a lot more watchable than that sounds :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eYTkvZqbnQ

The line that brought me to a stand still was "the future of AI depends on the moral compass of like 5 people".

I think folks here (and Lemmy generally) are more savvy about AI then the gen pop (though Lemmy is famously FuckAI)....but even if you're training a nanoGPT model from scratch on hardware you own ...you're still beholden to outside forces.

Eg: the people's champion - Qwen - seems to have split or gone closed weights for 3.7. That's not a good sign.

Reason for post

In the recent [Meta] chat, I noted an undercurrent of "no man is an island" - that is, yes, you might host your own X, but you're still dependant on external Y (eg: SearXNG).

Self hosting / FOSS / forking mitigates some of the "we changed the terms of service after the sale" enshittification we see occurring in related spaces (eg: right to repair). But there's only so much leverage you can enact before it becomes pyrrhic.

I would like to believe "fuck you, I won't do what you told me" is our bulwark against market forces.

At the same time, it's sad to see so many "Don't be Evil" mission statements not survive contact with reality (watch the vid: OAi was founded on the ideal of "don't let AGI kill us")

I think what happens upstream has effects down stream too (see prior X vs Y examples)...

Not sure where this leaves us. It's a weird time to be alive.

Enjoy the video (and their others - Ai2027 is eye opening). Look forward to any productive chat this post might inspire.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What is your actual message, here?

[–] magikmw@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd like to second this question.

[+] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone -6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'm confused by your confusion. I can try restating it another way if you can tell me what isn't clicking.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, from my second reading of your post, you make a number of observations, but it's not clear whether you support AI, or whether you support self-hosting.

Generally, most posts have a point to make or an opinion on a topic, some will summarize their ideas into a cogent question for discussion.

None of that is present here. You give what amounts to be an opinion, but counter it with "on the other hand" and we dont end up knowing what you actually think.

[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The post was fodder to stimulate discussion, but to make it clearer -

[1] Self-hosting gives you real but bounded sovereignty.

[2] You control your stack, but not the foundations it runs on.

[3] Even the most committed local-AI person is downstream of decisions made by a handful of people in boardrooms they'll never enter.

[4] "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me" is worth defending, but it has a ceiling, and that ceiling is getting lower as AI consolidates upstream.

[5] That holds for self hosting anything else.

[6] The community sometimes talks about sovereignty like it's binary, but it's a dial, and we should be thinking harder about who's turning it.

[7] Finally, i am pro self hosted AI. I am also an AI critic.

Clearer?

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Clearer?

Not really. Most of your statements have no relative reference, so they are really ambiguous. Example:

The community sometimes talks about sovereignty like it’s binary, but it’s a dial,

Great start! And I agree, we should welcome all shades of self-hosting, whether that's someone just starting or a hardcore digital off-grid self-hoster.

But then comes the next part:

and we should be thinking harder about who’s turning it.

What does this mean? Are you saying we all have different tolerances and preferences for how much we value digital sovereignty? Are you suggesting that we are all at the mercy of the Powers that Be and that they "turn the dial"?

One thing I think would have helped would have been to indicate that your topic is AI-focused. For me, I went into the reading with the impression that you were talking about self-hosting in general.

[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

What does this mean? Are you saying we all have different tolerances and preferences for how much we value digital sovereignty?

Are you suggesting that we are all at the mercy of the Powers that Be and that they "turn the dial"?

Let's use SearXNG as framing device.

SearXNG is a metacrawler. It's not a search engine, it's an aggregator. People talk about it like it's a search engine but it's not.

Which means your operation of it is beholden to others (quite a lot in that case). Sure, you control the hop. You don't control what's upstream of it. Whoever you use still gets pinged. Eg: Google still gets queried. Bing still gets queried.

You've added privacy at the point of entry, not independence at the point of source. What they do affects you directly, whether you want it to or not.

That's something to think about if sovereignty is a concern.

Same issue with pi hole, email, VPN on VPS etc etc.

One thing I think would have helped would have been to indicate that your topic is AI-focused. For me, I went into the reading with the impression that you were talking about self-hosting in general.

It's not (just) about AI. It's the same pipeline. Frontier lab to local LLM. Upstream (Google) to downstream (SearXNG).

In both cases you're running your own endpoint against infrastructure you didn't build, can't audit and can't influence.

Self-hosting the bottom of the stack doesn't change what's at the top of it, and that's exactly the problem....because the top directly influences the bottom.

The dependency just sits further back in the chain.

The chains bottom out at the same chokepoints - a handful of labs, a handful of infrastructure providers, a handful of index owners. No man is an island.

Anyway, I didn't really want to pre-digest it this much, so I framed the post to allow out loud thinking in which ever direction it goes. This was not meant to be an exercise in "here's what I think, fite me", it was an invitation to think out loud together.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

OK, I get where you're coming from.

This has been an issue for a very long time, partly caused by the lie we were all told, that the internet would free us. And we were OK with Google et al taking the helm.

[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 1 points 1 week ago

Right?

To be clear - I don't know how to solve this problem, or how big the problem is.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think its completely on topic personally.

We should keep in mind that self hosting means different things to different people. For some (and probably a huge chunk of the fediverse) its about working towards being free from the oligarchs, controlling your own data, etc.

But for others it may be just sharing some movies with friends or being able to watch high quality when you have two tin cans and a string for an internet connection. It may be trying out different technologies, maybe learning a few things to try and get a few more bucks a year. It may even just be they can't afford or just don't want to pay for the five subscriptions they'd need to have their bike computer sync up with their fitness tools so they can estimate their caloric needs better.

And none of these reasons are wrong, just their own reasons for wanting to selfhost.

So I hope everyone will continue to keep that in mind in the comments.

[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I hope so too. And I hope it (upstream affects down stream, no man is an island etc) generates some productive conversation.

To wit: the recent Plex situation.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We should keep in mind that self hosting means different things to different people.

THIS, is the crux. You said it yourself @curbstickle@anarchist.nexus early on in your intro to being the new sheriff in town: 'There are so very few of us' relatively speaking. However, even in our small circle, the word 'selfhosting' means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To some, if you don't have an enterprise rack at home that dims the lights when you power on, well you're just vanilla at best. To others, running your stack on a VPS is just as enjoyable and rewarding. To some, a laptop server to run one or two Docker containers fits the bill. Some like AI, some don't. To say that you have to be 'this tall' to ride this ride is just downright silly to me and very counterproductive. All selfhosters do not align by the same star. We are diverse as the day is long, and that's what is so very enjoyable to me. I love seeing how different people have wrangled technology to tackle a problem and arrive at their own solution.

I truly think we can all coexist without curb stomping someone who 'ain't from around here' or someone who has different ideas and approaches than we might. At least that is my hope.

[–] nexttech@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

This is why i love Lemmy

Incredible well thought out answers!

[–] kanera@feddit.cl 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

im very skeptical of this channel just because of how much it anthropomorphizes AI, it feels propagandistic.

Instead of taking the statistical analysis approach, its easy to rely on the marketing of "AI scary and will kill us and we're not ready" or whatever, like, scifi is cool, but this is not that.

I like this especific explanation on an AI responce to a PR (the whole thread is good in that sense), as to why it says what it says, its a boring and statistical framework, shaped by rules that turn it into a complex machinne.

We as people like to anthropomorphize other things, read into them and see our own reflections, and altho its not bad to have empathy, but thats not always reality, and we need to be weary of how this behaviour can be exploited.

This whole youtube channel is personally off to me, mostly because of the super professional look, how out of the blue it appeared, not knowing anyone from the team that researches any of these topics (maybe i just havent looked into the credits) and how their weariness of AI is the same as the weariness of the companies, which have the interest of selling it (see claudes secret model thats a danger to the world and must not be published).

With the amout of money in AI, i worry its a psyop from some company that want to promote the idea of AGI, so that AI business stays viable for that little bit longer.

End of rant, i hope it made some sense lmao. Fuck IA