I'd love to self-host something like Picasa or Google Photos. Alas, there are not too many choices that can replicate the experience.
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281–290 of 625 posts
Re: Start Self Hosting
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson , no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works . Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd…
I think it has come the time where the society starts to advance without caring about laypeople, if some folks can learn it, if there is documentation, then we can just go on without caring about who doesn't know how to use it, because that's fixable. And I speak considering the German government who had to pull back from Linux because employee didn't know how to use it Let's start treating tech as the world treats e…
It is about expendable time. I mean it might take you a few hours or so do it, or even less.
People working in other sectors, maybe with a family when they come home, do not have that skill or luxury.
And speaking from experience, documentation is often greatly lacking. For example just today I had to thumb down a couple of google docs because it was riddled with inconsistencies and lacking crucial information. And that’s a company with near infinite money. And its like that for most software, with great docs an exception rather than a rule.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#283This article is a bit delusional and oblivious to market dynamics. 1. Privacy: Self hosting is not necessarily more private than cloud services. The security of self hosted services is only as good as the effort put into maintaining it. Who do you think invests more in security: the giant corporation or a free open source project? Even if the project is well maintained, there are many ways your server can be compromi…
1. I don’t understand why you conflate security with privacy. Or to be more precise, it depends on your threat model. A badly secured self hosting will make yourself vulnerable to targeted attacks over your privacy. While it’s an issue you should consider, those attacks are pretty unlikely. However traditional cloud services will harvest every bit of what they get about you with a frightening efficiency but they’ll n…
Security is necessary to maintain privacy. If someone gains access to your systems, nothing you had on there is private anymore.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedeskt…
I'm certainly not a layperson, but systemd frequently confuses me. I want to edit a service to harden it for example. Oh, wait I shouldn't edit it directly with vi? Because it gets overwritten by package updates. Okay, makes sense, I need to use systemctl edit instead. But that opens a file that has everything commented out. Do I uncomment the [Unit] heading? What do I need to keep and where do I add my additions? I…
> it gets overwritten by package updates
This doesn't happen. The package manager installs the new configuration under a different name so that you do not lose your changes and can merge them easily.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#285Seems to me that there's a middle way. Self hosting is too hard, but making sure you've got local duplicates of all your stuff is less so.
As a simple example: I use Dropbox and Google Drive extensively. I'd like not to but the utility and ease is hard to beat. But I have made an effort to only use Word and Excel (rather than gdoc/gsheet) and have hooked up my Synology so it backs up all my cloud services whenever there's a file change.
So - I'm not strictly self hosting, because it's too hard, but if Dropbox doubled price or Google stopped doing GDrive, I'm safe. Same with photos and other critical assets.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#286For those suggesting e2e encryption of data in Cloud services, how is that possible? How could you, for example, run Salesforce and have Salesforce only see encrypted data? Seems extremely complicated or impossible -- isn't the point of encryption that nothing can be done with it?
Re: Start Self Hosting
#287I self-host everything but my email.
Hosting email is just too much. Big providers just treat you as guilty of spam, unless proven otherwise. Just too many hoops to jump through.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#288For those advocating e2e encryption instead, is that even possible with most cloud services? How can you encrypt Salesforce data, for example, and still have Salesforce perform all of the necessary operations on that data, if they can't even see it?
Re: Start Self Hosting
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm certainly not a layperson, but systemd frequently confuses me. I want to edit a service to harden it for example. Oh, wait I shouldn't edit it directly with vi? Because it gets overwritten by package updates. Okay, makes sense, I need to use systemctl edit instead. But that opens a file that has everything commented out. Do I uncomment the [Unit] heading? What do I need to keep and where do I add my additions? I…
> it gets overwritten by package updates This doesn't happen. The package manager installs the new configuration under a different name so that you do not lose your changes and can merge them easily.
what they are saying is that they edited the file in /usr/lib , which definitely would get overwritten. You're supossed to copy it into /etc/systemd/ for the appropriate service type.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedeskt…
I'm certainly not a layperson, but systemd frequently confuses me. I want to edit a service to harden it for example. Oh, wait I shouldn't edit it directly with vi? Because it gets overwritten by package updates. Okay, makes sense, I need to use systemctl edit instead. But that opens a file that has everything commented out. Do I uncomment the [Unit] heading? What do I need to keep and where do I add my additions? I…
systemctl edit --full does what you want.
I wish package managers would make patching packages easy, this kind of thing is so much more manageable on Nix.