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Privacy

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How Many Of You Privacy Pioneers Self Host (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by irmadlad@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm just mildly curious. I know this isn't the self hosting chan, but how many of you self host services as part of your efforts to retain your privacy, security, and anonymity?

I've been self hosting something for decades now. I got really started back in the PreNapster era. I ran an independent, selfhosted, fully licensed, internet radio outfit. That was back when music on the internet was a lot of cheap, tinny, geocities, midis. LOL I worked with a company called IM Radio Networks. They and Phillips, developed one of the world's first bookshelf stereo, that was internet ready. Hook it up to the internet, and you could listen to AM/FM and IM radio. I've often mused that if it weren't for Shawn Fanning, the music landscape on the internet might look a bit different as he forced the music industry to reevaluate how they did business.

Now, I self host a ton of stuff just for my own needs. It's an enjoyable, purposeful, hobby, that keeps me busy. It's also, so very educational, and I learn new things daily.

ETA: Man it does my heart good to meet and greet privacy minded users who also self host. It is an integral part of my privacy, anonymity, and security posture. If you aren't already, or are thinking of self hosting, do it! You don't need massive racks in the closet that dim the lights on reboot. A simple NUC or even RPi are quite capable of serving up services. You don't need a Tier 1 feed from your ISP. Keep it simple and basic and work up from there to meet your needs.

Thanks again to all those who responded and shared their experiences.

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[–] freedickpics@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have a local network for sharing files between my devices but I don't open anything up to remote access. I might change my mind once I'm more skilled at networking but right now I don't trust myself to be able to set up something secure. If I'm on the road I just plan what I'll need and manually sync it across before I go

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I don’t trust myself to be able to set up something secure

That's totally understandable. I will admit, the first server I tried to stand up got ransacked in an hour. I received a nastygram from the VPS saying that my server was attacking other servers which can have serious consequences. Of course I shut it down right away. I had just the OS, nothing else on there, so at worst it caused a some other servers to implement a block on my IP.

So I sat down and started reading, and testing, ad nauseam. Learned about hardening a Linux server. Learned about UFW and Fail2ban, and other security deployments. Learned how to bash. It's been a learning process that still thrives. I thoroughly enjoy the experience.

But yes, it can be daunting at first, I totally get that. Of course, you have a much broader resource to tap than I did at the time, but that's what I really dig about the internet. It is the sum total of the world's knowledge. Not necessarily wisdom, but vast repositories of information.

Have a blast bro.

[–] freedickpics@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How did you get into it? Any resources you'd recommend for a noob who wants to get into setting up servers?

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Oh gosh.... Well, first you should get a subscription to Byte magazine. LOL J/K but that's how far back it goes. I'll pull some bookmarks here in no particular order.

And of course right here

ETA: Me Skuzi...I did not answer your first question. I got into computers back with the original Altair kit. I saw recently there has been a revival of the old 8000. Wasn't much you could do with it at the time, but it was super cool and I was addicted. After that, if memory serves correctly, I had a Timex/Sinclair. Had a cassette tape drive you'd use to load up an app. The TI 99 & 994a were probably my first real complete computer setups with drives, memory expansion, etc. You needed something like a kitchen table to lay it all out on. It sprawled all over the place, but was a decent platform for it's time. After that, I've had at least everyone there after. LOL

[–] nicgentile@lemmy.world 18 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I just launched a business to help non technical people identify and selfhost their business tools. I faced such problems when I lived in a fascist country and now that I live in a fascist country again, I figured its a good way to go.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

That's super cool. I've always thought that every household should have a server as we live very digitally dependent lives now. Back when Microsoft released their homeserver edition, I thought that was going to be a good angle, however, it didn't take off. If I were a younger man, I've often thought about assembling small, closet servers that could sit on a shelf and be used by the household members. I also see a lot of 'mini' server layouts using Lenovo ThinkCenters, which are surprisingly pretty snappy servers.

[–] nicgentile@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that. I take self hosting as not turning to big tech for the very same solutions I can spin up myself on a private server.

That being said, self hosting also involves servers at home that run personal services.

My line of work is mostly in business. Getting people to operate their businesses with open source tools on private servers, local, in the country and abroad, as they wish.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that.

Absolutely. I'm not one to split hairs in the definitions. Old computer at home, paid for VPS, hell even an old laptop.

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[–] NedRyerson@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

NAS, Jellyfin/Plex, Copyparty (Google Drive replacement), Kiwix (Wikipedia), Joplin, Searxng, Ollama (LLM). Plus all the various searching tools, the maintenance tools, etc. I have pretty strong compartmentalization of my storage into separate media pools that all have their own RAID setups, plus an external backup.

It's a bit of work to get all set up, but I use docker compose and autoheal / watchtower to keep the services going. I use Caddy and my own domain to make the services I want available externally to my network.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

watchtower

Do you find that Watchtower sometimes screws up the update? I know I was plagued with that issue enough to drive me out to search the webs. OG Watchtower hasn't been updated in 2 years and shows no real sign of activity. I went searching for a fork:

https://watchtower.devcdn.net/

Haven't had any issues since.

[–] NedRyerson@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago

Thanks for that! I have struggled with watchtower from time to time, so knowing there is a good fork out there is great. I'll try it out.

[–] CodeGameEat@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago (6 children)

I do! I have a small kubernetes at home where I try to host everything I can.

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[–] Eirikr70@jlai.lu 6 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Self-hosting for a bit less than 10 years. My main pain is that my setup is now stable and I have nothing left to tinker with.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

and I have nothing left to tinker with

Blasphemy! LOL Congrats on the stable stack.

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[–] Fijxu@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Me, hi

[–] Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

Me too, hellos!

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Awesome!

[–] s3rvant@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 days ago

DNS, Jellyfin and game servers mostly; occasionally will tinker with other stuff but those are the ones that have lasted

[–] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Still shopping around for a cheap enough Optiplex or ThinkCentre that has bare minimum encoding (HEVC 10-bit) and RAM (16 GB), but once I find my baby I'll be running Nextcloud, Immich, and Jellyfin in Proxmox. I want to leave Google behind very badly, especially for my files and photos I got in the cloud, but also for music streaming since I'm a daily YT Music user.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

ThinkCentre

I've seen some really nice rack set ups for ThinkCenter. Small, unobtrusive, and quite capable.

[–] termaxima@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Self hosting looks interesting, but I'd generally rather keep things offline. Even as a software developer, I value simplicity, and most online "services" I find entirely superfluous ; self hosted or no.

Jellyfin ? How about a big external drive with movies on it, just plug it into your viewing device of choice.

Hosting my notes ? I take my notes on physical paper. (Loose sheets, because notebooks have the same scaling issues computer notes have. Sometimes I just want to splay everything out on the table and do big picture work. That's also why I only use one side of the sheet.)

Music streaming ? I dont even know if you can self host this one (probably yes) but I'd rather just copy the file over ; even a huge library doesn't take that much space.

Photos ? I just have folders on an encrypted drive, with some backups elsewhere. Though I guess Immich looks interesting...

Documents ? Okay, I should self-host this one. For now it's all local, on-disk (encrypted of course, there's no good reason not to), but it can be quite inconvenient if my only copy is at home on my desktop.

So no, I don't self-host yet, and when I do (hopefully soon) it will be only in a limited capacity ; mostly out of a convenience concern, privacy being a distant second.

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[–] tensor_nightly69@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I'm currently running 2 Proxmox hosts with 3 LXC containers and 3 VMs between them, and on my NAS - 2 VMs and... 50 docker containers.

I reeeeeally don't like centralized services. 😂

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[–] huquad@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago (8 children)

I try to selfhost wherever possible. There are a few exceptions where it's not practical (email for example), so I prefer not Google/Apple/Microsoft when that happens. In those cases, I also like to diversify so any potential enshitification is less painful to resolve.

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[–] suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

*Raises hand*

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[–] astropenguin5@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have a couple Minecraft servers using pterodactyl :3

I probably will self host a lot more when I have my own place and money tho

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I used to be heavy into Minecraft. I had a really nice set up on a VPS. Ran shaders and a ton of add ons. Fun stuff.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

services

gitea (forge)
pmwikis (PIM) e.g. fabien.benetou.fr including... notes on self-hosting
affine
wg-easy (WireGuard, VPN)
copyparty (prototype collaborative filesharing)
ntfy (notifications)
peertube (videos) e.g. video.benetou.fr
Jitsi Meet (video meetings)
immers (federated Metaverse, really)
WebDAV (files)
networked-aframe (live collaboration in XR)
open-easyrtc
telegram-pim-bot
transmission (seeding linux ISOs)
fireflyiii