this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
160 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

39435 readers
3 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For example, something that is too complex for your comfort level, a security concern, or maybe your hardware can’t keep up with the service’s needs?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 154 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Tor exit node, public Lemmy instance.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

Weirdly for extremely similar reasons

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yes these. Essentially anything that an unidentified user could push data to that would land me in regulatory trouble. I would want to host these things, but I don't want to become a distributor of anything that would get me a search warrant.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Hosting an email server is pretty sure a magnet for half the Chinese IP range.... So I would refrain from hosting that myself.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I figured email would be a common theme. I’m just starting to dip my toes into all of this, so an email server is not on my to-do list (and may never be).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Google and other large scale providers have intentionally made it very difficult to self host your own email. It’s generally not considered a wise move these days and is very difficult to maintain.

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Anything that the family uses. Because when I cease to exist, my wife isn't gonna take over self-hosting! So e-mail, chat, documents etc.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I told my wife when I die, she's just going to have to throw it all away and start over.

We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I'm hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You know, I never thought about that

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hadn't either until a few years ago. It's something worth considering.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dealing with the digital afterlife of a hacker - The Daily Dot

The main challenge was Michael’s tech footprint: His Gmail, Twitter, personal domains, rented servers, hosting business, home servers, and a huge collection of Apple tech.

“It was tough for Beth because she got home and she had a brand new phone and couldn’t even get on the Wi-Fi,” Kalat said. “Michael had done everything. Beth is very smart—she’s a scientist—but Michael had handled everything. A friend had to come over to reset the Wi-Fi password.”

Also see:
Ramsey: How to Put Together Your Legacy Drawer

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Bitwarden has an option called emergency contact.

The emergency contact can request access to see all the saved passwords. If I don't deny the request then the request is automatically approved after X days.

I feel like this would cover most of the issues in the article.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Password manager like Bitwarden. I'd rather they take care of it for me. The consequences would be too great if I messed it up.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Smart move, unless you really know what you're doing and have redundancy. When I first made the switch from Lastpass to Bitwarden I had tried to host the vault myself instead of using the cloud version, which worked fine right up until the moment I had a server outage and lost access to all my passwords.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, the clients all cache your vault. It shouldn't be a huge issue for it to be down even for a few days.

But I do upload encrypted backups of the server every 6 hours to cloud storage

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh man, that's actually really good advice! I recently switched to Vaultwarden, but you're right: If my server goes down, I can't even restart it, because the password for my account is in there! Damn! Close call!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Well with bitwarden/vaultwarden you can have a copy of your entire vault on your phone or computer or both... so even if your server was totally dead, you'd have access to your passwords. Solid backups is a must, I follow the 3-2-1 rule on super critical systems (like vaultwarden) and test that you can actually recover. Something as simple as spinning up a VPS, testing a restore, testing access, see if that could work in a pinch until you get your server back online, then tear it down. Linode is very cheap for this kind of testing, it'd only cost you a few pennies to run a "dr" test of your critical systems. Of course you still want to secure it, I'd recommend wireguard or tailscale instead of opening access to your DR node to the internet, but as a temporary test it's probably fine if your running patched up to date versions of docker, vaultwarden, and I'd always recommend putting a reverse proxy in front like nginx.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Usually the password are also stored locally.

I can definitely access all my passwords offline with bitwarden

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mail, Bitwarden and Joplin. Too important stuff for my Raspberry Pi setup.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Second. I used to self-host Bitwarden. Then I realized it'd be too devistating to lose all my passwords, even with backups. So I moved to their cloud service and paid for my families accounts too.

Joplin tho, Joplin stays on the server with no backup. I should really, really make a backup this weekend.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I am hosting bitwarden myself (on a VPS) and I am not that concered about losing my passwords, because every device syncs all passwords locally regulary so that you don't need internet to access them.

So to loose all your passwords not only do you have to loose your bitwarden server and all the backups, you also have to loose access to all your bitwarden clients synchroniously.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • My own search engine (a meta search engine like searx-ng would be fine though)
  • a tor exit node, because don't want to deal with the legal hassle (i run snowflake on multiple machines though)
  • a SMTP relay (recieving email is easy. Sending email is a pain in the ass)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Sending email is super easy as well. Making sure everyone can receive it is such a pain though.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Bitwarden actually. I was really split on this but ultimately I trust Bitwarden, the company, to run a secure server than myself.

Who has time to track CVE's and react to them in a timely manner? I don't. If something happened, I probably don't have the infrastructure or know-how to even realize I had been breached.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A public Matrix server. Its just a never ending black-hole of ever increasing storage requirements and the software is too buggy to not become a maintenance hassle.

I do run a Synapse server for bridging purposes, so I am not just talking in theory.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

XMPP is safer and lighter anyway

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Backups. Cloud services like Backblaze B2 are so cheap for the durability they offer, it just doesn’t make sense for me to roll my own offsite solution with a Raspberry Pi at my parents’ house or something. Restic encrypts everything before it leaves my machine.

Password manager- it’s too important and it’s the thing that has to work for me to recover when I break something else. I’m happy to support Bitwarden with a few bucks a year.

Email- again, it’s mission critical and I have a habit of tinkering with things and breaking them. And it’s just no fun. The less I need to think about email, the happier I am.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's what "1" in the "3-2-1" backup strategy stands for, a true offsite backup (preferably continent where you do not reside) For "2" I would still deploy a local offsite at someone's house for quick disaster recovery.

Downloading your 10TB data from B2 (or even requesting a tarball HDD from them) is costlier than recovering from an offsite backup facility within an hour's reach.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Email. Way too complicated and lots of maintenance. Not to mention it you mess it up, there are huge downsides.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

A social media platform where you can post or view images. I don't wanna deal with CSAM.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

not complicated or hard, just don't care enough: music, spotify is fine, especially on the family plan.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Minecraft. When I started out it was fine but when I began to get regular visitors I got DDOSed for days on end and people poking me for ssh access. Never again.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

@[email protected] I would say in retrospective, email, but it is too late now.

While I do have self hosted backups, I also have offsite, paid copies as well, not sure if that can be considered "self hosting" though.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t self-host Nextcloud. I have a cheap cloud instance running it and it’s essentially my off-site backup for important documents. I don’t put just anything up there but I live in New Orleans so I feel like I should assume my home server won’t necessarily be online when I most need insurance documents and shit like that.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I tried getting a music setup to work, but I couldn't find a good solution for generated playlists with new song recommendations. The self-hosted music service just can't add songs it doesn't have yet, so it's not really feasible. Plus I still have a very cheap YouTube Music subscription from the GPM days.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like I'm having a change of heart on NextCloud... Every time some little thing breaks I have to figure out how to fix it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Really? Nextcloud has been pretty set-and-forget for me.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

A video hosting service. I cant be bothered collecting and storing all that media.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Nothing really. I'm comfortable hosting mail, chat, my passwords and important documents. However:

Hosting personal/important data for other people is a bit intimidating because you kind of guarantee for safety and availability.

And services that are likely to be misused for illegal stuff and would be too bothersome. Otherwise i might host an anonymous spam eating email-forwarder, maybe a tor exit-node and a forum where adults can practise free speech. But that kind of stuff just attracts the wrong kind of idiots.

load more comments
view more: next ›