I agree, software development has become insane. It's basically people creating problems to justify their existence, very much like the bureaucrats.
The reality is that the vast majority of people don't really need "self-hosting", what they would need is a decent software that they can run on their computer and let others access the data from time to time, mostly locally because global availability is rarely worth the hassle.
But since there is not much money into that and devs are enamored with insane layers of complexities and obtuse use case that are irrelevant for the vast majority we get the server software, that relies on web views and have a large disconnect with the data on a local machine.
You just had another layer of stuff to manage on yet another computer when most already have one sitting idle the vast majority of time. I think the laptop craze is also partly to blame.
Even good local Mac apps have dried up and now it's all cloud-based subscription software, and you are supposed to be thankful you can install open-source stuff with a docker image and god knows how many configuration steps and gotchas.
Many of those softwares would be desirable and worth a bit of money if only you could just have a simple installation and management process but instead you have to pay with your time, which is not worth it for most. So, at this point, people just say fuck it and pay someone else, usually one of the big tech providers to take care of the problem and that's that.
As much as I like web technology for interactive documents, the software use case is still largely a pain in the ass.
The reality is that the vast majority of people don't really need "self-hosting", what they would need is a decent software that they can run on their computer and let others access the data from time to time, mostly locally because global availability is rarely worth the hassle.
But since there is not much money into that and devs are enamored with insane layers of complexities and obtuse use case that are irrelevant for the vast majority we get the server software, that relies on web views and have a large disconnect with the data on a local machine. You just had another layer of stuff to manage on yet another computer when most already have one sitting idle the vast majority of time. I think the laptop craze is also partly to blame.
Even good local Mac apps have dried up and now it's all cloud-based subscription software, and you are supposed to be thankful you can install open-source stuff with a docker image and god knows how many configuration steps and gotchas.
Many of those softwares would be desirable and worth a bit of money if only you could just have a simple installation and management process but instead you have to pay with your time, which is not worth it for most. So, at this point, people just say fuck it and pay someone else, usually one of the big tech providers to take care of the problem and that's that.
As much as I like web technology for interactive documents, the software use case is still largely a pain in the ass.