Sovereign Apps

Hey folks! I wanted to share an epiphany I had during the last 9 months of building a personal self-hosted project for music library management and personal streaming. During the summer, I added Iroh as a replacement of having to deal with tailscale or wireguard to the app suite (with all the user complexity that requires). It took me quite some time to implement it correctly and build some custom modules here and there. But in the end, I had this amazing moment of realizing that with this networking layer spreading, all at the app level instead of at server level, plus local LLMs pushing forward, the number of personal, self-hosted, customized apps, both paid and open-source, will skyrocket. Removing the networking setup complexity, plus, customization complexity, is just key for self-hosting into the masses. The addition of easy local intelligence (not yet here) to these self-hosted apps could be the final tipping point, allowing for a variety of non-technical, easy-to-set-up "Personal Home Hubs" that anyone could have. The user experience of self-hosting, thanks to these two vectors, Iroh networking and AI customization, could improve so dramatically that I think we'll soon see a wave of amazing, personal apps running on our "home hubs" that are as easy to set up as installing a simple app.