schmonz.com is a Fediverse instance that uses the ActivityPub protocol. In other words, users at this host can communicate with people that use software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc. all around the world.
This server runs the snac software and there is no automatic sign-up process.
If you're into photography, there is a free open Flickr-style photography platform which you can host yourself called Vernissage. It also has Fediverse compatibility so people can follow Vernissage accounts from Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. More info at:
You can follow at:
For techy people who want to install their own Vernissage manually, docs are at:
🌱 https://docs.joinvernissage.org/documentation/vernissageserver
#SelfHosting #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Flickr #Alternatives #Photography
Come join me and @Gina in Luxembourg this October!
#OSCL26 (Open Source Conference Luxembourg) has a brand new track devoted to “Decentralized Technologies for Digital Sovereignty”:
🔗: https://conference.opensource.lu
We are looking for speakers interested in discussing these topics:
Apply here:
🔗: https://pretalx.com/open-source-conference-luxembourg-2026/cfp
The conference takes place on Wednesday October 7th in Belval, Luxembourg.
Please share! 🚀
#Fediverse #FediAdvocacy #conferences #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #TheFutureIsFederated #selfhosting #interoperability #DigitalSovereignty #activism
Why do I run FreeBSD for my home servers // Mathieu Aumont
Anyone else DIY monitor the air quality in their living space with a raspberry Pi and get mobile notifications about status?
Just me?
Question for those who #selfhost their email servers - has anyone migrated from #postfix to #openSMTPD?
I've been running Postfix for more than a decade on the primary MX, but it frankly feels overkill for a relatively simple multi-domain setup for essentially just hosting my family's email.
I'm already running openSMTPD on #OpenBSD on my secondary, so I've got some limited experience with it.
Nothing against Postfix, it just feels that with my setup I'm using an 18 wheeler to transport a case of beer...
Mobilizon is a Fediverse-compatible free open source events platform, developed as a libre alternative to Facebook Events. You can find out more at:
You can follow the official account at:
If you're a techy person there are manual installation instructions for self-hosting at:
🌱 https://docs.mobilizon.org/3.%20System%20administration/install
#SelfHosting #CommunityHosting #Fediverse #ActivityPub #FacebookEvents
If you are #selfhosting / #homelabbing: you have my utmost respect. Do not trust other parties to have your back - because they don't.
However, few words to the wise: if you operate a minimalist setup - eg everything running in VMs on a single host: please do consider the consequences of downtime.
You probably don't want to run your critical services on one machine without a fallback. If those services include your smarthome foundation, DNS and firewalling: you don't want to troubleshoot in the dark because everything is down and you can't even turn on the light anymore.
You aren't the first nor won't he the last to learn this lesson when disaster strikes though 
boostedI was ill last week and discovered something uncomfortable: a huge Jellyfin library isn't entertainment, it's homework. Every time I opened it, it asked "what do you want?" and I just scrolled.
So I built a TV station instead.
ErsatzTV turns a media library into real linear channels with schedules and logos. It ships for Linux, Windows and macOS. My server runs FreeBSD.
Turns out the entire porting effort was one conditional. The code asked "is this Linux?" when it meant "is VAAPI available?" VAAPI is userspace, FreeBSD has it, and .NET has had OSPlatform.FreeBSD for years.
One || later: Intel hardware transcoding in a Bastille jail that can see exactly one GPU and one read-only dataset.
I now have a sci-fi channel. I don't know what's on tonight. That's the point.
I am pretty amazed, how fast and power efficient even those older Intel N4100 Mini PCs are.
My old Wyse 3040 unfortunatelly died recently, so I had to migrate everything to the more power hungry N4100 system.
But turns out, when you disable the TurboBoost, it's average power consumption is around 1,5 - 2,5W running with Debian and a Podman container with my Website, and some custom scripts for fetching stats by bluetooth and usb for the BMS and Solar Charger. Neat!
#selfhosting #solar #diy
Good morning Fedi friends,
I have been feeling a rising anxiety over the state of the open web and the fediverse - after seeing efforts by politicians all over the world (in Europe too!) to introduce age verification laws for social media.
My way of coping?
Teaching people how to self-host their own Fediverse profile (using the superb #GoToSocial) via #YunoHost.
Chapter 1 in this series is available here:
📣 New post 📝
"A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)"
Basically a visual guide showing how to install #GoToSocial via #YunoHost and set it up with some basic security.
⏱️ From start to finish, it should take about 25-30 minutes.
It's my act of resistance against tech bros... I love the idea of teaching people how to self-host their own social media instance, connected to the fediverse ✌️❤️
Thank you @yunohost and @gotosocial for empowering us all!
#SelfHosting #Fediverse #newbie #MySoCalledSudoLife #blog #resist
I saw a terrible message from DigitalOcean yesterday. I was helping a co-worker learn to do SASL authentication with Postfix, using Dovecot to do the heavy lifting, (second co-worker this week! Breaking people free from Google!) and we got to the point where we were ready to have him send out a test email - a reply to an email I'd just sent him that exercised all the moving parts of his inbound path.
But when he tried to send, he couldn't talk to my email server. I checked to make sure he wasn't being firewalled, but he didn't show up in my abuse listing. But then on poking around, it became clear he couldn't talk to ANY port 25 ANYWHERE. And I thought, "Oh, right, they've got that blocked. Le'ts find an article talking about how to unblock it." Not too uncommon. So I looked for their docs on unblocking 25.
Turns out, there's no automated way - not even a support ticket type for the purpose. You have to open a general request.
But man, they REALLY don't want you opening a general request! This is a masterpiece of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-to-run-your-own-mail-server
Without meaning to, they've eloquently captured the essence of everything we're seeing with the destructive corporatization and centralization of online services. They say:
"In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities."
This, not to put too fine a point on it, is BAD FOR US.
We need *more* selfhosting. I was a customer of theirs for a few years, but I stopped after they had some catastrophe that prevented me from accessing my server console for more than a week. Their support was underwater and I didn't get any movement until I decided to publically name and shame them with details of the incident.
This kind of attitude should make anyone hesitant to sign up for services with DigitalOcean.
I’m thinking about turning my #VPS in a #Proxmox node and adding it to my #homelab cluster. All other nodes are at my home. They will communicate through #WireGaurd. How bad is this idea? Anyone tried this?
#AskFedi #SelfHosted #selfhost #selfhosting #proxmoxve #ProxmoxCluster
The amazing folks at @yunohost are running a fundraising campaign to cover their operating costs for 2026.
I personally make a monthly recurring donation to them but wish I could give more 🥲
If you use their services and you can afford it, please consider donating to their project. Every Euro / Dollar / Yen counts:
🔗 : https://yunohost.org/donate.en.html
#NotAllHeroesWearCapes #SelfHosting #empowerment #resist #YunoHost
Pretty funny that the most often requested file from my small kitchen-server is "/robots.txt". Pretty surprising, since a lot of LLM-bots usually ignores this file 
The other requested files are just some js crap, which is obviously don't exist on my server — possibly some script-kiddies tried to find some entrypoint (see "config.js" and "env.js").
The funny part: the referrer URLs. Hope, the default content of NetBSD /etc/passwd from inside the sandbox was made someone happy 
European institutions seem to be all in when it comes to introducing age verification mandates for citizens in member states: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-sets-out-common-approach-eu-wide-age-verification-technologies
I now have daily anxiety thinking about the future of the fediverse.
So how do I channel this fear and turn it into something constructive? I'm going back to writing #selfhosting guides for newbies.
It's a great distraction, which gives me a bit of hope. Especially the next guide, which will cover my favorite fediverse software - #GoToSocial (which is powering this instance) - and how to install and configure it. Your own little home on the fediverse! Lightweight and features-packed.
Surely something like this would fall outside the scope of regulation. Right? Right?
#MySoCalledSudoLife #YunoHost #VPS #AgeVerification #privacy #EUBigTech
@labellaragassa It's a bunch of tradeoffs. There are acceptable solutions where trust is warranted, but they're less convenient, and require more #SelfHosting skills. How far down the rabbit hole of inconvenience are you willing to go, to satisfy more of your ideals?
Doing a mastodon *minor* update is still a mess in 2026 requiring manual steps to trigger db migrations pre and post update. And that's using docker. Without containerization its even more steps to do. Just in case anybody is still wondering why people do not "just self-host"...
Building a immich only box thinking of going debian and btrfs any other ideas or tips?
It's a 8th gen nuc
Tia
I haven't turned on this raspberry pi 4 8gb of ram in like 3 years. I've been feeling like resurrecting it and setting it up again.
What services should I install on it?
What casing or peripherals should I use?
RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@subnetspider/116758330967344651
Bastille makes a great self-hosting platform! Look at this absolute list of self-hosted software ⬇️
nsd, unbound, acme, adguard, gitea, haproxy, homebox, mail, netbox, nextcloud, plex, rustdesk, samba, syncthing, tor, unifi, vaultwarden, and more on one box.
#FreeBSD #BastilleBSD #selfhosted #selfhosting
New blog post: Do-the-work instead of proof-of-work, for Git hosting
https://blog.legoktm.com/2026/06/14/do-the-work-instead-of-proof-of-work-for-git-hosting.html
On https://git.legoktm.com/ I am now running a fully client-side Git repository viewer; on the server-side it is entirely static hosting, which makes it super cheap.
I hope this is a useful proof-of-concept as an alternative to (IMO wasteful) solutions like Anubis and provides better user privacy in the process.
It is surprisingly easy to get a locality domain.
I followed this guide and had one in 18 minutes:
https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/
Kinda postmortem:
1) The maximal log size before rotation and count of gzipped logs to store should be increased in the newsyslogd configuration. This should be applied to any service, which is looking into the void^WInternet. So, I will not loss log records, related to the start of attack…
2) Also, Asterisk log should be added to newsyslogd configuration first. It weren't added here, so *.log files became too big (> 1 Gb) and of course fail2ban ate a lot of memory while parsing these big logs. If they were rotated properly, then fail2ban will not eat so much memory, parsing small enough files.
3) Since start of attack in logs were lost, then I could only imagine possible root cause of an attack. By default, any IP, which once failed to provide the proper credentials to login somewhere in my kitchen server, is banned immediately and forever.
But somehow those attackers managed to use just 2 IPs to make an attack and they weren't banned before manual intervention 
According to fail2ban logs they were banned, but they were obviously not banned by npf. So, I think, they started attack right in time when my blacklists were successfully updated and npf was reloading — as a result their IPs appeared as "banned" in the fail2ban, but the fail2ban failed to ban them via npf, so "IRL" their IPs still weren't banned. Time to revisit my script to update blacklists 
4) Looks like I need to install some Intrusion Detection System (possibly snort
since it is mature enough). It isn't good to rely only on one mechanism (fail2ban + blacklists + npf) to protect my precious machine.
Oh fuck, I was mistaken — it was a real attack, not LLM bots
— someone, using machines from French hosting, was trying to connect to my Asterisk box, using various SIP endpoints.
The attack was started at Monday's night and was found only because monit reported about too much memory eaten by fail2ban 
Interesting, why fail2ban didn't banned attacker's IP, because it should do that right after failed attempt to login?
Tine to revisit fail2ban jails configs…