I self-host a lot of stuff.

[tomstoneham@dair-community.social]

@neil Great piece. I am a year into self-hosting and did it entirely for the learning experience.

I quickly realised that I wasn't confident enough in my security to use Nextcloud or Vaultwarden and am aware that I have probably made my home network vulnerable to a concerted attack.

So it has ended up very much a small scale hobby, not hosting anything confidential or essential to day-to-day functioning (where I pay for Proton, Signal, Bitwarden etc.).

[tootbrute@fedi.arkadi.one]

@piepants @neil lots of middle ground people can do first before trying self-hosting.

use whatsapp --> use signal --> run a matrix server

ms office --> libreoffice/only office --> self-host collabra

lol
hard to get them off that sweet crack cocaine of "convenient" big tech stuff though.

[delilahtech@tech.lgbt]

@neil
I have built and operated my own hardware firewall, and it worked wonderfully, until my ISP changed my modem to a non-bridgeable one

I have built (numerous times) a software server on my laptop to host a local blog. I wrote tutorials to myself so I can replicate it on the next occasion—which always necessitated a refreshed tutorial

I want to have a hardware firewall between me and the internet. I want a non-google email. I kind of want my own Fediverse instance

I don't have the time, am low on money, and have few spoons

I will find that firewall, but it will likely be a secondhand commercial rig, and my networking knowledge/skills aren't there

I want to build a DMZ for IoT things, run my own cameras, keep my smart thermostats from calling home every fifteen minutes

But I can't find the energy to figure out how to freaking use the thermostats I have

I'm with you 100%—I could self-host... most things

But I can't, actually

[marramgrass@social.lol]

@neil I have self-hosted stuff in the past, and occasionally think about doing so again for some stuff. But less and less of my computering is recreational and I choose to pay companies to worry about everything for me rather than spend my spare time doing more of what I do when I'm working.

Which is, of course, a kind of privilege in itself.

None of that is a criticism of course, just a reality that I've resigned myself to and remind myself of every time I think "oh, I could set that up myself".

[rail@snailedit.social]

@neil and you gotta hope the tools you’re using is actually secure

(www.reddit.com)

[petko@social.petko.me]

@Colman @neil

As opposed to 'just pay the faceless corp instead of self-hosting.' This is notably not techno-libertarian at all, very inclusive, and the opposite of atomizing --
just look at Facebook and Twitter after all, they are the *Threads* that knit together our nations!!!

If self-hosting shit is anything like a political statement, I'd say it's closer to anarchy than libertarianism.

[nocturnalnessa@infosec.exchange]

@neil in a better timeline, i'd like the idea of neighborhood/community hosting. like, the local library doing it, with help of tech savvy volunteers. that would be wholesome

[xchaos@f.cz]

@neil "It appears that “self-hosting” might mean different things to different people."

Definitely. We are able to do #selfhosting because we are local ISP for 25 years. We run our own datacenter from at least 8 years, and I was planning how to do the waste heat recycling for 10 years. We have access to second-hand hardware, because it would be hard to afford only the new hardware.

So #selfhosting is still collective activity of some kind, you need small business, or cooperative, or something, because you have expenses.

I suppose aggregating VPS-es for multiple instances on same physical hardware may have some advantages eg. with containers sharing the same ZFS filesystem (you can turn on eg. de-duplication of files)

So the #selfhosting usually anway about seeking some kind of cooperation. I would not be able to "selfhost" without cooperating with experienced admin...

[unqualifiedtechbros@mastodon.social]

@neil
Do you recommend yunohost?

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@unqualifiedtechbros I have no experience of it, I'm afraid.

[gjoel@mstdn.dk]

@rail @neil I self host exactly so my data can remain in my relatively closed intranet (that is, completely NAT'ed). There's still a password in place, but to be honest, it would be trivial for an intruder to take over everything.

[khleedril@cyberplace.social]

@neil That is an excellent article.

I do think that you can self-host on someone else's computer, shrinking all the financial costs to a couple of small ones (hosting fee and domain name; just those are cheaper than having any kind of home internet connection).

I run a root server in the cloud, on an OpenStack instance. The entire machine is defined by me. I regard it as self-hosting.

[csolisr@hub.azkware.net]

@neil And (I'm yet to read the full article, but) the upcoming raise in hardware prices will make the entry price on self-hosting even more complicated to reach

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@khleedril Great!

[evgandr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@NocturnalNessa @neil We, in Russia had such thing before (and looks like will have in the future ), when the ISP prices were high and unaffordable for usual people, but there were a lot of coaxial cables and 10BASE2 (IIRC) network equipment on the market for a reasonable price. So, people just connected apartments and buildings with these cables and had a local network in the block (or between some blocks) for filesharing, gaming in local network, etc… Something like this: https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9

[randomhost@tech.lgbt]

@neil I think this summarizes why I'm suffering from more or less severe burnout symptoms on a daily basis.

When I'm done developing depressingly poor quality software projects designed to "generate" revenue for a greedy tech company for the day, I am expected to keep on top of the never-ending bot attacks against my self-managed services.

Every time I install a new kernel version or significant package updates, my anxiety peaks while I wait for machines and services - some of them being the backbone of my digital existence - to come back up.

I'd rather just pay for someone else to do it, but experience has shown that companies can't be trusted with anything anymore as increasing profits has become the driving force behind everything with quality and reliability being downgraded to a mere afterthought.

I hate that system and I hate being part of it but I have to pay my ever growing greed and inflation driven bills so what can I do?

[evgandr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@petko @neil @Colman Agreed. If you need something, like some black-box to share files with other people — you could just make something yourself with existing technical skills. Or organize with some other people with necessary skills and make a thing. This looks like some kind of anarchy and definitely not like "techno-libertarianism" lol.

The "how-to" knowledge is freely acessible and no one hides it with paywall — you can learn or get help from other people (for beer or money, etc) if you don't have a time/courage to learn.

[evgandr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@ahnlak @neil I like this metaphor! I don't have a car, but I have a bike and like to make a lot of maintenance by myself. And this definitely looks like self-hosting — if you able to have fun with wrenches and grease, then you will do it yourself and will have fun. Otherwise, no fun

[pheonix@hachyderm.io]

@neil Neil is absolutely spot on and we need to talk about the politics of this. Telling people to "just self-host" to escape surveillance capitalism is the exact same tactic as telling people to "calculate your carbon footprint" to stop climate change.

It individualizes a systemic, corporate failure.
Privacy and digital safety shouldn't be luxury goods reserved for cis-white-male engineers with unmetered fiber connections, rack-mount servers along with free time and financial stability to pull it off. When our response to the collapse of digital rights is "run your own infrastructure," we are engaging in digital redlining. The solution to predatory data brokering isn't forcing single mothers working two jobs to learn Kubernetes; the solution is ruthlessly regulating the data brokers out of existence.

[carstenraddatz@pixelfed.automat.click]

Thanks for sharing. This is useful info