I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material.
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
Tailscale solves the access/NAT issue and keeps your services off of your WAN, but it relies on a 3rd party to let you use your own equipment. I understand why it is useful and a necessary service but I'll never touch it.
There’s a bunch of ways to achieve a similar goal. Especially if the scenario is you and your family to home or a server.
I use it with a few friends and we do stuff like host backups for each other. It makes it easy to securely allow that one server to be available to my hosts.
What worries me is how the HN groupthink mentions it at every possibility.
If people on HN aren't capable/willing to run their own kit there's no hope.
In the slashdot days you'd never get such worship of tailscale and cloudflare. Even in the early days of HN you'd have people suggesting a bit of rsync rather than using dropbox.
It's everywhere, reddit and the fediverse also seem to have drank the cloudflare coolaid. Someone's been pushing the idea that it's impossible to host on 80/443 safely, only big brother can keep you safe.
I understand why it's not feasible. I admin a server at home and one for a small business, and most people do not really understand "why doesn't it just work like a normal app." For the foreseeable future self hosting is an ideological choice rather than one of practicality :/
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.