It is very easy to sign up to Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and everything else. No manual is needed for doom-scrolling and on-boarding is instant. Personally I would prefer to have my own full-on LAMP stack at home, with Postfix for email and everything accessible via my own subdomain.
So, why can't I have that?
During my standard install of my favourite distro, I would only need to enter my name, subdomain and email password for everything to be magically installed, so I have a standard web site, some file sharing and email out of the box.
However, it would take me a fortnight to get this setup and I wouldn't have a clue how the email actually worked, if it worked. This wouldn't be my first rodeo either, so I wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch. I am also sure that there are some that have setup umpteen virtual linux machines that they could get everything done by tea-time.
Whether two hours or two weeks, it is still not that much work in the bigger scheme of things, which makes me wonder, why haven't I got some all-singing and all-dancing bash script that automates the whole process? But why has nobody else done it either, to make it fully open source and as easy to obtain as it can be?
Also, why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this? It could take the mainboard and power circuitry from any laptop, and, out the box, provide a decent web server, mail server and whatever else.
There is a suspicious absence of products in this space.
> why can't I buy a glorified router box that does all of this?
Step 0 is to secure that box, as routers are obvious targets, even before they have self-hosted data. There are some products based on RPi, NAS and router form factors.
> suspicious absence of products in this space
Earlier efforts:
Active OSS projects include Proxmox (https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/), Paperless-NGX (docs), Immich (photos), NextCloud and others, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhostedThanks for the links, however, everything above is off the mark, even NextCloud, which I once used to really like. The only problem is that you are instantly deep into the weeds that no PC/Apple consumer-civilian would ever wade into. Facebook and their ilk don't need a manual, and neither should a webserver with email server need a manual to get you started, just subdomain, email domain and username should get you started.
As for security, it is all a bit meh. If you have a box that only runs https: with no other ports open, you are half the way there. If you are just running static pages then you are done. If you run a NextCloud type of beast then you are opening things up, but my hunch is that it works just fine with nobody losing sleep on it.
One example might be the eero (now Amazon) router that is managed by cloud account and mobile device app. To get the simplicity you want, keep control plane in cloud and keep data on the edge device. Parts of the control plane could gradually migrate to the edge device over time, while retaining the same user-facing interface. But it would always be a challenge to "serve" content from home networks with NAT/CGNAT. Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale or similar proxy can help in some cases, e.g re-routing email to big providers that refuse to recognize self-hosted outbound.