I vastly prefer local applications to self-hosting. The Internet really needs to return to its original roots; a network of equal peers.
Start Self Hosting
401–410 of 625 posts
Re: Start Self Hosting
#402The FreedomBox project is a good example of making self-hosting easier:
https://www.freedombox.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
Re: Start Self Hosting
#403I truly do miss Picasa so much, and I'm still mad at google about its loss. It was used extensively in family history research centers, and did a great job of automatically picking out pictures of your ancestors in old photos. I wish google had open-sourced it. Losing Picasa seriously made me distrustful of putting my personal data (in this case all of the annotations) into a proprietary app. I prefer open source, bu…
Fellow Picasa user in mourning here.
I have settled on XnView MP [0] as my Picasa replacement in terms of managing my photos locally.
It took a bit of UI + options tweaking to get it close, but it is pretty fast for my purposes (quickly browsing folders of photos). My main image library folder is synced on Dropbox so I can have a nice local version of things on each computer.
It doesn’t do AI stuff, but for photo management it gets the job done.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#404Self-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…
Huh, ZimaBoard [0] (Hardware SBC project by the CasaOS people) looks super cool. Sadly still on pre-order, but that is almost exactly what I want.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lambda users"? I've not heard that term before.
AWS Lambda, "serverless compute". No servers to manage. No runtimes to deal with. You load functions into a cloud provider (AWS for example) and feed the function inputs from other AWS services like a queue or an API endpoint. Pay only for the execution of the function based on input. It's really amazing conceptually, but like the parent said, there aren't many self-hosting options out there. IIRC there is some Apach…
> I just realized that isn't the context of the OP's statement. Heh.
I just waned to reassure you that you weren’t alone in the confusion. :-)
Re: Start Self Hosting
#406I am not aware of any OS which will stand up to the internet without management for months at a time. Until that problem is solved, self hosting remains a dream.
Ideally you should be able to set up a machine, and just have it work for at least a year, on average, with no need to intervein, do updates, patches, etc.
Like the old Novell systems we keep hearing about, serving files from rooms since closed off to humans for years.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comments like yours are a great example of why Linux has a hard time being user friendly. You take something that's deeply technical but easy to understand for yourself, and somehow generalize it to everyone. "If it's easy for me, it is easy for everyone", without noticing that perhaps your expertise plays a big role in making it easy. The better question is why should a layperson ever need to know about systemd in t…
Systemd is easy compared to init scripts. Maybe that’s the comparison point. I know that’s my comparison point, since I wrangled init scripts for a couple decades before systemd, and when systemd came out, suddenly it felt a million times easier to run services. > A system where editing text files can make or break the system, is not a reliable system. It's easy to make mistakes in text files. Specially for users wit…
Here's why this matters: some systems require you to edit text files in order to work at all. But at the same time, they are extremely sensitive to the content of the text file.
Editing text file to make advanced configuration may be acceptable if the casual end user never needs to do it. When I say never, I mean never ever ever. If you need to edit it once every few months, you better have really really good "linting" facilities to tell the user right away whether their edits are going to be accepted or going to cause the system to break.
Now granted, systemd is a system utility, not an end user application.
If the system overall is built such that the end user never ever ever needs to know about systemd, then it's sort of ok.
Now, when it comes to self-hosted, the line between "system utility" vs "end user application" may be blurred.
If you think a web server is a system utility, then by all means, go ahead and make it fragile and complicated. That's how everyone is doing it.
But if you think - and at least I do - that it's important for casual users to be able to self-host their own websites with ease and reliability and without having any system level expertise, then the points I mentioned about the system not imploding due to the content of text files is extremely important.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#408This 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 looks very interesting. I see that Facebook is one of the data sources. Would you know if it’s possible to get posts and comments from Facebook groups (even if it’s just the ones by the user)?
Re: Start Self Hosting
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
To do this right you should also think of backups, updates, and monitoring. Self-hosting is true freedom but doing it right for things like email is akin to running a small business. On the positive side docker makes many things a breeze.
I tried with Docker before and it is not a breeze as you think it is. I tried to use Docker for Calibre-Web and it is a pain to make it work. Because Calibre-Web required to access their database in the filesystem outside of Docker. Docker provided minimal (more of lacking) information of how to expose the filesystem for Calibre-Web to use their database. Calibre-Web cannot create their own database, it relies on Cal…
I am surprised by this shortcoming of Calibre image. I guess the trade is learning how to install calibre vs. learning how to deal with docker. I'd also agree that even if you use docker and installation is easy - for any self hosted apps you are using for a long enough time you end up learning enough about them to be able to install without docker (and avoid managing docker in addition to everything else).
Re: Start Self Hosting
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think you all proved the point that this system is too complicated for anyone outside of a small group of professional IT people.