371–380 of 625 posts
I don’t need a reason why to self host, I need nice, clear, up-to-date tutorials on how to self host various services. Self hosting should be easy enough for everyday people. Perhaps preconfigured servers that treat services just like apps. Once I have a server setup, I should be able to install (and uninstall) services in a single click. The OS can handle permissions and containers.
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In 15 years I may be dead, and yes I'm pretty much certain. Life is too short to worry about these things. I'll say controversial things in private or anonymously.
Cloudflare blocks readers running Tor or VPNs and GitHub has been down every day this week. I don't think your plan is bullet proof.
Self-hosting is something that we should be constantly iterating on making easier; it's really the path forward for privacy centric folks. The main challenges are managing workload scheduling (SystemD is complicated for a layperson). Networking is another challenge; for instance, if you wanted all or part of these services to remain offline or on a Mesh VPN there's a lot of knowledge required. There's some projects t…
But why stop at self-hosting? Beyond self-hosting, it could be extended to local-first paradigm meaning that there's a choice to have a scalable on demand auxiliary cloud based for handling bursty access demands if you need it. In addition, you can have extra backup for the peace of mind.
I'm currently working on realiable solutions (physical wireless and application layers) to extend the local-first system to be automatically secured even you have intermittent Internet outage unlike TailScale and ZeroTier [2]. This system will be invaluable where Internet connection is not reliable due to weather, harsh environment, war, unreliable power provider or lousy ISPs [3].
[1] Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud:
https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf
[2] Internet outage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_outage
[3] NIST Helps Next-Generation Cell Technology See Past the Greenery:
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/01/nist-helps-nex...
This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing…
This is nice, I've always wanted to build something like this, but it would integrate life choices and can show you where one's timeline "dead-ends," because you made the other choice. The idea is inspired by the movie Bandersnatch. There's something so powerful about reflection with clarity.
I do have plans to add context to one's timeline; for example, to optionally overlay the weather on that day, or major world or local events. That might be helpful in understanding your own timeline entries in hindsight.
So the life choices thing is interesting. You're talking about divergence points, or nexus events (there are different terms in different literature/cinema), and charting your world lines, basically. (Some Loki and Steins;Gate would be recommended watching.) I am not sure how to do that, but would like to figure that out...
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> 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…
Sure, there's a midpoint where we would ideally want as many people to be able to use a technology as possible, which means making things easier, but we underestimate the capability of most users and dumb things down so far that those users not only believe that X technology is too hard but believe themselves to be too stupid to do anything that requires even the faintest amount of know-how.
I do think we've gone way too far in the direction of acting like everyone, except we archmages on HN, have the intelligence of toddlers and can't figure out anything for themselves. Everything becomes so easy, but at the tradeoff of everyone being dependent on the centralization.
The incentive has to be there, though. Convincing people to self-host is like telling them to eat more broccoli. Just because it's good for them doesn't mean they're going to do it, and companies of nearly any size certainly won't choose to make things hard on their users.
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You also need stuff like networking, TLS/certs, and DNS which aren't easily packaged, at least not in a way that doesn't require you to make sketchy changes on every client device.
Something like Cloudflare Argo tunneling would work great for this. No certs at all for the user to mess around with, it terminated on the public internet, not in your house.
I must say, it has not been easy at all. I learned a lot of things. I did not attend any school lectures to learn this. I am still in high school, but thanks to the beauty of the internet and a ton of effort I was able to get a static blog working, learned a lot about free software, how sometimes just using certain web servers is just too complex.
The main web server is at [0]. It runs on my home internet connection. Thankfully they do allow for port forwarding. But it's certainly a good exercise to understand how much we give for granted to giant and sometimes small corporations.
I've learned to write and express my feelings among lots of other technical knowledge.
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I used to love running my own servers with all the services etc. I’d manually write beautiful bash scripts to keep it all nice and easy to rebuild on the fly. My first job had 10 Ubuntu servers (on site) and I was the only guy who used Linux at home and had experience with sql. I have never volunteered to maintain servers since, it was horrible and everything was always my fault (it kinda was, I was a hobbyist at bes…
Sounds like you might've had an unusually bad experience. Might've also been the distro; I don't like Ubuntu much myself. :P Maintaining inherited environments is also much more painful than ones you get to design from the ground up. I work with varied environments, and one with ~250 RHEL / CentOS machines has approximately the same level of maintenance burden as another with a dozen or so Ubuntus because the first e…
Hosting a server from my house is a violation of the TOS from my ISP. My choices are them or DSL. I don't live in a rural area. I'm well inside a metro area of 5 million people in the USA.
So get a VPS.
Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
You can use a popular Linux dist and turn on automatic updates, and use Snap apps that update by themselves. But you still would not have control - apps could update with breaking changes. The only way to win is by choosing simple tools that are either considered "infrastructure", or simple to build and even patch yourself if needed.
Maybe I'm too old (experienced) and cynical, but I always read that as "apps that are going to brick themselves". No thanks.