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Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

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Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#21

Post by whartung »

ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

My singular issue with self hosting specifically with email is not setting it up. Lots of documentation on setting up an email server.

But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers.

As a contrived example, if Google blackballs your server, who do you talk to about it? How do you know? Do that have email addresses, or procedures for resolution in the error messages you get talking with them?

Or these other global, IP ban sites.

I’d like to see a troubleshooting guide for email. Not so much for the protocols like DKIM, or setting DNS up properly, but in dealing with these other actors that can impact your service even if it’s, technically, according to Hoyle, set up and configured properly.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#22

Post by danillonunes »

doubled112 wrote: post #13
JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers. Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.

This is my plan. I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future. However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.

As for the domain risks, my suggestions is to stick with the .com/.net/.org or something common in your country and avoid novelty ones such as .app, .dev, etc, even if you can't get the shortest and simpler name. And if you have some money to spare, just renew it to 10 years.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#23

Post by layoric »

ozim wrote: post #5
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

Self hosting at home - what is higher risk? Your HDD dying or losing Gmail account? Oh now you don’t only self host, now you have to have space to keep gear, plan backups, install updates, oh would be good to test updates so some bug doesn’t mess your system. Oh you know installing updates or while backups are running it would be bad if you have power outage- now you need a UPS. Oh you know what - my UPS turned out t…

Different strokes for different folks. Motivation for me has been a combination of independence and mistrust. Every single one of the larger tech companies have shown their priority to growth above making good products and services, and not being directly user hostile. Google search is worse now than it was 10 years ago. Netflix has ads with a paid subscription, so does YouTube. Windows is absolute joke, more and more we see user hostile software. Incentives aren’t aligned at all. As people who work in software, I get not wanting to do this stuff at home as well. But honestly I’m hoping for a future where a lot of these services can legit be self hosted by technical people for their local communities. Mastodon is doing this really well IMO. Self hosted software is also getting a lot easier to manage, so I’m quite optimistic that things will keep heading this way.

Note, I’ve got all the things you mentioned down to the UPSes setup in my garage, as well as multiple levels of backups. It’s not perfect, but works for me without much time input vs utility it provides. Each to their own.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#24

Post by deadbabe »

layoric wrote: post #23
ozim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosting at home - what is higher risk? Your HDD dying or losing Gmail account? Oh now you don’t only self host, now you have to have space to keep gear, plan backups, install updates, oh would be good to test updates so some bug doesn’t mess your system. Oh you know installing updates or while backups are running it would be bad if you have power outage- now you need a UPS. Oh you know what - my UPS turned out t…

Different strokes for different folks. Motivation for me has been a combination of independence and mistrust. Every single one of the larger tech companies have shown their priority to growth above making good products and services, and not being directly user hostile. Google search is worse now than it was 10 years ago. Netflix has ads with a paid subscription, so does YouTube. Windows is absolute joke, more and mor…

If your trust is violated, typically the worst that happens is you are fed a couple more relevant ads or your data is used for some commercial purpose that has little to no effect on your life.

Is it really worth going through so much effort to mitigate that risk?

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#25

Post by johnea »

johnea wrote: post #6

Nice article! It's heartening in the new millennium to see some younger people show awareness of the crippling dependency on big tech. Way back in the stone ages, before instagram and tic toc, when the internet was new, anyone having a presence on the net was rolling their own. It's actually only gotten easier, but the corporate candy has gotten exponentially more candyfied, and most people think it's the most straig…

Just for reference, take a look at this email system using FreeBSD:

https://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=1450

p.s. That was another place the article could mention a broader scope, there is always the BSDs, not just linux...

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#26

Post by zdw »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #15

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want. Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky. I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be fir…

> docker

There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#27

Post by layoric »

deadbabe wrote: post #24
layoric wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different strokes for different folks. Motivation for me has been a combination of independence and mistrust. Every single one of the larger tech companies have shown their priority to growth above making good products and services, and not being directly user hostile. Google search is worse now than it was 10 years ago. Netflix has ads with a paid subscription, so does YouTube. Windows is absolute joke, more and mor…

If your trust is violated, typically the worst that happens is you are fed a couple more relevant ads or your data is used for some commercial purpose that has little to no effect on your life. Is it really worth going through so much effort to mitigate that risk?

Again, it's a value judgement, so the answer is largely personal. For me, yes. The social license we give these larger companies after all the violated trust doesn't make sense. If your local shop owner/operator that you talked to everyday had the same attitude towards your when you went shopping and exchanged pleasantries with most weeks, people would confront them about their actions, and that shop wouldn't last long. We have created the disconnect for convenience, and tried to ignore the level of control these companies have on our day to day lives if they are so inclined or instructed to change their systems.

Cloud is just someone else's computer. These systems aren't special. Yes they are impressively engineered to deal with the scale they deal with, but when systems are smaller, they can get a lot simpler. I think as an industry we have conflated distributed systems with really hard engineering problems, when it really matter at what level of abstraction the distribution happens when it comes to down stream complexity.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#28

Post by boplicity »

whartung wrote: post #21
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

My singular issue with self hosting specifically with email is not setting it up. Lots of documentation on setting up an email server. But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers. As a contrived example, if Google blackballs your s…

Most services, including email providers, spam databases, and "ip-ban sites" have clear documentation, in terms of how to get on their good side, if needed, and it is often surprisingly straightforward to do so. Often it's as simple as filling out a relatively form.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#29

Post by layoric »

SoftTalker wrote: post #16
haiku2077 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.

Isn't depending on Claude to administer your systems rather divergent from the theme of "Self-Host and Tech Independence?"

Claude and others are still in the adoption phase so the services are good, and not user hostile as they will be in the extraction phase. Hopefully by then some agreement on how to setup RAG systems for actual human constructed documentation for these systems will be way more accessible, and have good results with much smaller self hosted models. IMO, this is where I think/hope the LLMs value to the average person will land long term. Search, but better at understanding the query. Sadly, they will also been used for a lot of user hostile nonsense as well.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#30

Post by AstroBen »

sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I self-host most of what I need but I recently faced the ultimate test when my Internet went down intermittently. It raised some interesting questions: - How long can I be productive without the Internet? - What am I missing? The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad). Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what…

I've taken this as far as I can. I love being disconnected from the internet for extended periods - they're my most productive times

I have a bash alias to use wget to recursively save full websites

yt-dlp will download videos you want to watch

Kiwix will give you a full offline copy of Wikipedia

My email is saved locally. I can queue up drafts offline

SingleFile extension will allow you to save single pages really effectively

Zeal is a great open source documentation browser

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