My way of rebelling against techbros and autocrats:

December 2024: quit all Big Tech platforms and start #selfhosting essential services

December 2025: write guides for newbies about how to self-host

I'm also in discussion with a blogger I admire to start a podcast about tech... where we'll focus on solutions (instead of problems)... aiming to inspire others to join in...

It's been a really heavy year but these little acts of rebellion give me hope ✨

Self-hosting does not make your data safe.

If you don't put in place, review, *and test* backup and recovery plans,,and security measures appropriate to the risk, your data are not "safe".

Your data might be less affected by the whims of third parties, which can be valuable for sure, but don't confuse that with your data being "safe".

And I say this as someone who loves self-hosting.

Any "beginners' guide to self-hosting" which doesn't lead with, or at least focus on, security and resiliency, is getting it wrong, IMHO.

#SelfHosting

BookLore: A self-hosted, multi-user digital library with smart shelves, auto metadata, Kobo & KOReader sync, BookDrop imports, OPDS support, and a built-in reader for EPUB, PDF, and comics.

https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

#Books #Reading #FOSS #SelfHosting #BookLore #Software

Just published: how I migrated the Mastodon instance burningboard.net to a multi‑jail FreeBSD setup with BastilleBSD. Central PF firewall, real dual‑stack, and clean service separation.

https://blog.hofstede.it/migrating-burningboardnet-mastodon-instance-to-a-multi-jail-freebsd-setup/

#FreeBSD #BastilleBSD #Mastodon #SelfHosting #IPv6

🎄 Advent of Donations - Day 2 🎄

Today's donation of $50 go to Daniel García, maintainer of the Vaultwarden project.

Read more about Vaultwarden and why I'm sponsoring it in my blog: https://britter.dev/blog/2025/12/01/advent-of-donations/

#opensource #selfhosting #vaultwarden #bitwarden #donation #AdventOfDonations

In the past few days I’ve seen talk about RAM prices shooting up due to demand from big datacenters.

Today I read that a historic brand like Crucial - I own plenty of their hardware, including SSDs - is dropping consumer products to focus on gear for those same datacenters.
The result (or maybe the intention?) is to push people away from self hosting, undermine the OwnYourData idea and make everyone depend on huge datacenters for life.

So much for owning your data.
So much for decentralisation.

Because taking down one giant datacenter is far easier than taking down thousands or millions of individual nodes.

Friends and colleagues, don’t trade your freedom for a bit of convenience. Once you give it away, getting it back is very hard.

Always Own Your Data.

#OwnYourData #SelfHosting

Aaaand we're back!

https://kzimmermann.0x.no

Now from a new location!

#selfhosting

Obligatory meme for my fellow homelab hosters 🙂
#homelab #selfhosting

Alt...

The Drake "no / yes" meme with cloudflare as the "no" and homelab as the "yes"

#selfhosting folks:

How, really, louder are ironwolfs 10tb+ compared to we red 6tb?

Hey all you selfhosters and homelabbers. When you are in need of a new fancy domain, where du you get it und how much d you roughly pay for it monthly. Are there any tld's which are really cheap? I mean there really seem to be people out there collecting that stuff and i think that must be quite expensive when you collect exessively.

#selfhosting @homelab @homelab_de

@rainy Get a
VPS (Vultr, Digital Ocean), a domain (Porkbun). Learn some DNS (BIND) and email handling (Postfix, maybe Courier IMAP). Pick a Fediverse server (Friendica, Mastodon). There's a lot to learn but you'll become more powerful for knowing it.

#selfhosting

PS: Dovecot is the common option for IMAP but they pulled a fast one recently with their config that's impacted lots of folks, and I've lost faith.

Quick question to those who use a local Ollama install: is there a noticeable performance difference between a normal install through the package manager and a docker install of ollama. The Manjaro packages are a bit out of daten (Ollama is moving quite fast in the last two months) an dont work with the lates qwen3-vl.
#llm #ollama #selfhosting @homelab

I made a few updates to my solar powered website.

Most of all, I fixed the uptime counter. I also made some tweaks to the wording, the gallery and the overall site design.

https://solar.stfn.pl/

#solarpunk #pv #selfhosting #raspberry

A heartwarming story and a call to action for self-hosters and users of independent services:

I just had a very pleasing interaction with a customer support person (Eddie) who works at a website that provides a service nationally in the small country where I live. The localness of the site is the point.

The site has recently put in place account blocking for scammers who put URLs in PMs that aren't on an allow list. As a user of a self-hosted Nextcloud, my account got blocked without warning when I shared a URL in a DM.

I contacted support, and Eddie replied to tell me I'd been blocked because of the URL in the PM, and that he'd restored my access.

I thanked him and asked him to pass on a message to the site's product managers. Here it is verbatim:

I use your website because it's a local, independent website. I have largely rid myself of the giants of the web, like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon. (I won't elaborate here how problematic they are.) I want to see a decentralised web for the benefit of society - and that means using niche websites like yourselves, including self-hosted services. That means it's hard to build an "allow list" of (for example) permitted file or image hosting services, because instances like my Nextcloud server will automatically fall into the "suspicious" pile.

I appreciate the work your website do to block scammers. But let's try to build protections that avoid the unwanted side effect of pushing people away from independent services.

Within minutes, I got a reply to say my Nextcloud instance had been added to the allow list! Bravo Eddie!

There's so much to unpick here: Because the site isn't a giant monolith, Eddie has the autonomy to edit the allow list; he's motivated to do it because he recognises he and I have common cause; and I was polite in my interactions with him, so he was prepared to take the time to read and absorb the case I was making.

#selfhosting #nextcloud #solidarity

Pretty interesting how an old hardware works well and compute well in the strange configurations.

Prereqs: Intel Atom N2800 1866 MHz and 2 Gb RAM.

Since there are no NetBSD builds of xray-core and v2raya — I spin up a FreeBSD VM inside the Qemu and without NVMM accelerator (not supported by my CPU). Execute these programs inside this VM — and the server still running and even doesn't overload

#NetBSD #FreeBSD #Qemu #IntelAtom #SelfHosting

Alt...

CPU usage graph from Munin. The graph shows 5-10% CPU usage. The graph rises to near 5% at near 11:40. With one visible spike to 120% at near 12:50.

Alt...

Load average graph from Munin. Overall usage were at near 0.3 but raised to 0.8 at 11:30. With one visible spike to 2.8 at near 12:50

Alt...

The memory usage by category graph. It shows rise of anon memory from 0.3 Gb to 0.8 Gb at near 11:00 or 12:00.

Alt...

Processes graph from Munin. It shows that there are near 53 processes before 11:00 and near 65 processes after this time.

Does anybody has a hint for a Mastodon INstance where i could test my Emby Notification Bot? It works using my own GoToSocial Server as endpoint, but it fails most of the time on mastodon.social, especially when i try to upload media. The logging on the Emby console is a catastrophy. I can only recon there is some kind of rate limiting etc.
I mean in the past there was something like botsin.space, is there something similiar, or could somebody give me an account on its mastodon instance for testing?

Dont want to fire up an own mastodon instance just for this.

#mastodonbot #mastodon #bot #selfhosting @homelab @homelab_de

Sending mail from residential ip be like:

It's easily solvable using a "free" SMTP relay. But the privacy benefits of self-hosting are lost.

I'm using smtp2go to deliver to outlook and gmail. I have no idea if smtp2go is good or no. Do you have any recommendation?

#mail #SelfHosting #email #relay

Alt...

X-Spam-Flag: YES X-Spam-Score: 6.619 X-Spam-Level: ****** X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=6.619 tagged_above=-10000 required=5.3 tests=[BAYES_00=-2, DKIM_SIGNED=0.1, DKIM_VALID=-0.1, DKIM_VALID_AU=-0.1, DKIM_VALID_EF=-0.1, FROM_SUSPICIOUS_NTLD=0.499, PDS_OTHER_BAD_TLD=2, PYZOR_CHECK=2, RCVD_IN_PBL=3.335, RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_RPBL_BLOCKED=0.001, RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_SAFE_BLOCKED=0.001, RDNS_DYNAMIC=0.982, SUBENDNUM=2, SUBSCONFIRM=-2, TVD_SPACE_RATIO=0.001] autolearn=no autolearn_force=no

I'm strongly leaning towards giving up hosting my own email. I've been doing it for 25 years this November, and I'm about done with jumping though all the hoops needed to get mail delivered.

Is there a company you can recommend that will take over all the work and give me an imap account?

I don't mind paying a reasonable sum per year, but I'd really like my email to work again consistently so I can move away from google. #email #selfhosting #SellMeSomethingIWant

Made my FreeBSD server at Netcup ready to host multiple isolated applications with automatic https via Let's Encrypt.

Internet → Server → PF firewall → Caddy jail (reverse proxy) → Individual application jails

Each app gets its own isolated jail for security, while Caddy handles all the routing and https. PF keeps the front door locked.

All of course with IPv6 first, where every Jail has it's own public IP address and using NAT for legacy IPv4.

Love how FreeBSD jails make this kind of segmentation so elegant.

#FreeBSD #Jails #SelfHosting #Caddy #ipv4

Alt...

Traffic flow diagram

Me: I'm gonna self host a mail service on an old laptop, with my *very* residential and dynamic IP address. What could posibly go wrong?

Spamhaus: *checks ISP and IP range* You are not supposed to do that.

Outlook smtp server: "550 5.7.1 Get lost!"

Gmail: I don't like you. But it's only one mesage, and DMARC is good: You go to spam folder.

spambots: LOOKS LIKE MEAT'S BACK ON THE MENU, BOYS! 👹

Besides some test mesasges, 100% of the traffic is spambots sending invalid commands trying to find a vulnerability, I assume.

In the linux world I feel confident with my monitoring tools, iptables and fail2ban. But in NetBSD everything is new to me. So I have to be extra careful.

#SelfHosting #NetBSD #email #spam #bot