Self-Hosted Everything Is Having a Moment
Three threads today all point toward the same quiet trend: people building or reclaiming their own infrastructure. The MikroTik home router post generated a long discussion about the sweet spot between consumer routers and enterprise gear. The IndieWeb post walked through building personal web infrastructure with open protocols. The Moonshine game streaming post is about streaming your own games from your own PC rather than paying a cloud gaming service.
None of these are new ideas, but they're clustering together today. The MikroTik thread specifically noted the company still supports old hardware, which drew appreciative comments, an implicit contrast with consumer networking vendors that push users toward subscriptions and planned obsolescence.
The Orion browser thread (Kagi's WebKit-based browser) also fits here: people actively looking for alternatives to Chrome, not just complaining about it. The 'replace the default' impulse is strong across hardware, software, and services right now.
So what?
There's a real and growing user segment that will pay for tools that give them control and don't require ongoing subscriptions to a platform. If you're building developer or prosumer tools, 'self-hostable with good defaults' is a genuine differentiator, not just a checkbox.
Read these
I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight
Orion Browser by Kagi
HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router