How do you think software could be designed and developed differently if everyone person on the internet had their own personal server? Anyone built any apps designed to be exclusively self-hosted? What could that mean for the future of SaaS?

I think it's more important that it be easy for "everyone" i.e. non technical users to transfer their data and apps from one host to another. I predict that literally running your own server will be a minority activity forever. But if the app hosting is properly commoditized, then the bulk of users retain similar levels of control over their digital lives as they would if they were fully self hosting, and can switch back and forth as desired. That implies data portability first and foremost. Anyone should be able to sync their app state to a plain hard drive, and upload it to a different provider on a moment's notice. This further implies a certain independence from IP addresses. I'd like to see apps identified by the public keys of their owners rather than a thin veil over an IP address (yes, this means someone needs to solve asymmetric crypto usability). But if all that works, putting up an app could be as simple as editing some of "your files/data", in a designated directory or whatever, and a general-purpose sync/backup algorithm deploys them, the same one that syncs files between your phone and laptop (data portability strikes again). Further deployment sophistication can be added later. There are also security concerns if the software has state; some kind of sandbox abstraction will mostly do it while being user-friendly. I do expect that to be the fundamentally tricky part, though.

So we have built something like this - basically put our platform on a mobile phone. And then made it very OS friendly (so far on iOS, and soon on Android). Which means strong integration with Siri, shortcuts, and widgets. Along with the ability to rapidly build mini apps and share them. The platform can also respond to silent push notifications which in essence gives us server like capabilities.

This is what I'm working on - but for me, it's important not to get overwhelmed by what we know as techies is involved in "runnnning a serrverrrr!" "Hosting and publishing your own content" should be as simple as running up Minecraft on your phone and opening it up to the LAN for other players to join.

So we had to do a lot of work to make sure the server does not get killed by the mobile OS. Which is pretty aggressive in its memory and cpu restrictions.

It’s worth investigating the origins of the project but this is one of the goals of https://urbit.org/