Speaking of #JDLL, some of you may remember that I had the honor of speaking at the 2025 edition, invited by the awesome @yunohost team to share my experiences self-hosting with them.

I asked my husband to tag along and bring our daughter so she could see me speaking on stage... and see that mamma does cool stuff outside the house too.

Well, my daughter brought up Lyon and the conference on the way to school the other morning. I asked her: "did you have a good time?" and her immediate response was: "I didn't understand anything you said!"

Me: "Well, it's normal, I talked about grown up stuff."

Child (4 then, 5 soon): "But what did you say?"

And then I proceeded to try to explain the concept of #selfhosting and #digitalsovereignty and how empowering it is to use a tech stack independent of #BigTech platforms... in an accessible way that she would understand.

It was SO DIFFICULT.

I probably failed spectacularly and she still doesn't understand. But it made me think that it'd be worth trying to explain this to older kids... like pre-adolescents or in their early teens? Maybe a project for another time.

Edit/add-on: my daughter asked me to speak about the Pink Panther or Bluey next time so she could understand 😂

#MySoCalledSudoLife #resist #parenting

New #Documentation: #SelfHosting a #Firefox #Sync Server

I decided to look at the feasibility of moving syncing off Mozilla's servers and onto one that I control.

It turned out not to be too much work as someone else had already done the legwork

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/linux/selfhosting-a-firefox-sync-server.html

#introduction ― I decided to create an alt account here to allow me
to connect more easily with SDF community.

My primary focus will be on tech-related things I like:
#pkgsrc on #netbsd #illumos and #slackware
#unix #sdf #gopher #smolnet #usenet #dos #c #lisp
#selfhosting #homeserver #permacomputing #lowtech
#hamradio #progrock #progmetal #ambient #postrock
#90s #scifi #cyberpunk #novels #seinen #manga

Documented my home-lab setup going into 2026:

https://danb.me/blog/2026-homelab/

#homelab #selfhosting

Quick question for the ZFS experts: I'm planning to install FreeBSD on my home server and want to use raidz2 with four disks. One thing is not clear to me from the manual.

I'd like to install FreeBSD on "hard disk 1" and leave the other drives untouched until I've configured the system (so I can still boot into the current OS on let's say "hard disk 2"). After having configured the system, I'd like to add "hard disk 2 - 4" to the existing zpool which has "hard disk 1", so that I end up with a raidz2 setup.

Reading https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool-attach.8.html I'm not sure how I should go about this. Should I configure the initial zpool (with one hdd) already as raidz2 (is that possible?), or is it converted automatically once I add the extra drives? The way I read the man page, the result after `zpool attach` will be a mirror instead of raidz2.

As you can tell, I'm quite new to this and still figuring things out. Any advice, links or boosts are greatly appreciated.

#zfs #raid #FreeBSD #BSD #SelfHosting #homelab

#SelfHosting week 0:
Phase 0. Choosing domain name for self hosting: plusbrothers.online seems available. the .net is my main website based on #WordPress
Considering also plusbrothers.community but who knows if it's possible. Something that warns users that's the same site but with other purposes.
What to do there: Mastodon instance with more than 500 characters if possible. Then Castopod, and maybe a WordPress to transfer English blog there.
Finally, choosing the most appropriate VPS server where to install #YunoHost currently confronting most famous VPS vendors' websites user interface for #accessibility - this is a showcase for customer care. Less accessible means less disability-friendly, that means "I'd prefer you don't come to us". Hostinger has an accessibility statement but it's very superficial and maybe copy-pasted from a template just because obliged by european laws, not for real care.

#selfhosting is:

Commitin programming crimes }:->

Few weeks ago I seriously looked to the mine OpenHAB installation and asked a question for myself: "Am I really need it?" Look, I have a few ZigBee devices, which are connected to the my server with the help of ZigBee2MQTT. Thusly, all necessary values and knobs are accessible through the MQTT topics.

And I'm using the OpenHAB (big Java application which eats ton's of RAM and constantly swapping) just to:
1) Read values from MQTT topic
2) Read weather forecast from Open-Meteo through simple REST API endpoints
3) Store all the data to the PostgreSQL DB.
4) Display these data in the nice Web page which works only in browsers with JS engine.

So, basically, I trade tons of RAM and processing power just for a nice web-page with few indicators. While retrieving data from my ZigBee devices processed by the another service.

After that thought, I started to think about replacing this monster with small hand-written program, which will not eat 700 MB of RAM. Just Nginx, small FastCGI script on C, which will read values from DB and display them on the simple HTML page. And another small daemon (also written in C) which will take data from MQTT topic (and from REST API of Open-Meteo) and will write them to the DB. And possibly some PGSQL procedures to analyze these data.

At least I'll have fun

#programming #C #smarthome #selfhosting

Alt...

Emacs buffer with some C code, which spews out the string with HTML, with substituted values for temperature and humidity.

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is paperless-ngx, a key part of keeping us, well, paperless.

It is a document management tool, but I use it in a very basic way: it is hooked up to our scanner, and anything we scan gets automatically converted to PDF and OCRd. We then shred the paper. I try to scan, and shred, everything on the day that it arrives.

It is particularly useful around tax return time, as it means I can easily get the information I need from stuff which people have posted to us.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

#FOSS #SelfHosting #Paperless

I had an old desktop PC sitting around. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu Linux, then Apache Server. Found that the instructions and help files are pretty good. So i decided to try to connect it to the internet. I had an old domain that was parked at namecheap, which seemed great for experimentation ... Got that hooked up to my home IP and set up port forwarding on the router. It worked! I now can see a basic website. Next are certificates for https, then email. Later then #mastodon ?
#selfhosting

Welp, the self-hosted, open-core, Mattermost release just introduced a 10k message limit on each channel.

Time to look for alternatives ...

#mattermost #selfhosting #enshittification

New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 2: installation & setup"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-2-installation-setup/

with a special shout-out to @shollyethan and @ilja who, a year ago, encouraged me to try self-hosting. And of course immense gratitude to the @yunohost team for making all this possible ❤️

I hope this guide may inspire others to try it, too. The path to digital independence and empowerment is easier than you thought...

#selfhosting #FOSS #empowerment

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

Reaching out to fellow #selfhosting fans and #DevOps using #S3 Storage. Since #minio is no more and is now just in "Maintenance Mode", what alternatives are you recommending?
currently thinking between SeaweedFS (https://seaweedfs.com/) and and Garrage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/)

Boost welcome.

Good morning Fedi friends!

This week I will publish a first post in my mini series for total newbies about how to self-host with #YunoHost.

The very first article will simply cover the basics of what is needed... then part 2 will be the step-by-step installation and connecting a domain + creating a subdomain... and then part 3 will cover installing an app (NextCloud) and setting up a backup system.

I'm hoping to get all this done before Christmas, in time for my one year anniversary of self-hosting with YunoHost (thank you again @ilja for setting all this in motion last year).

As I type this, I'm currently backing up my YunoHost and these days my backup files are about 13GB in size, broken down as follows (in descending order):

• #GoToSocial: 5.3 GB
• #PeerTube: 4 GB
• #NextCloud: 2.3 GB
• #Pixelfed: 1.4 GB
• #LinkStack: 91 MB

Wishing you all a great day & week!

#MySoCalledSudoLife #SelfHosting

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

People who self-host (anything, not just Mastodon). Are you running services at your house? If so, are you hiding them behind a VPS that tunnels to your home's IP?

CC @neil , because you're the first person I thought of that would be able to answer.

#selfhosting

#selfhosting folks:

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

Ik heb een blog met een aanbeveling voor de Git-werkplaats van de #overheid geschreven:

https://developer.overheid.nl/blog/2025/11/11/git-forge-overheid

Conclusie: vanuit het oogpunt van digitale soevereiniteit en digitale autonomie is een self-hosted #Forgejo de beste keuze voor de overheid.

#Git #DigitaleSoevereiniteit #DigitaleAutonomie #GitLab #GitHub #FOSS #OpenSource #GitForge #SelfHosting

@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.

Dear Fedi friends,

If you can set aside 11 minutes today, I highly encourage to watch @vkc's latest video: "I stream nothing, and I am happy."

🔗​: https://tinkerbetter.tube/w/ns3WDZZgAoe1SfrDCAUrni

It is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT and should be shown in media literacy and digital literacy classes everywhere. Actually, everyone should watch it (I'm about to send it to my family and friends).

My favorite part comes up towards the end. Veronica eloquently explains (9 min 27 sec in):

"I feel like we owe it to ourselves and to those who follow us to try and break free of algorithms, which tell us what we should like, who we should believe, and how we should feel about it.

It may sound melodramatic and maybe it is, but I see the increased dependence on algorithmically-driven entertainment as a symptom of that larger problem: uber-convenience that separates us from our critical thinking.

We're learning to abandon reason for small decisions, and wouldn't you know it, now it's easier to ignore reasons for the larger ones.

I'm not here to tell you what to think. I was raised in a "mind-your-own-damn-business" household and that's where my head is at. But I do want to implore all of us to think critically about how streaming media, autoplay, and the algorithm are impacting us."

I'm super proud to be a backer of her Patreon and I cannot thank her enough for this incredible video... which comes at the perfect time, as I was already planning to set up #Jellyfin next week.

If you can, join me in supporting Veronica's work here: https://www.patreon.com/VeronicaExplains

#DigitalLiteracy #BigTech #SelfHosting #independence #resist #MediaLiteracy

🏕️ my adventures in self-hosting: day 316 (realist edition) 👩‍🏭

a blog post in which I discuss how my #Sharkey misadventures provided some illuminating insights... including how grateful I am for self-hosted software that just works (hello @gotosocial). Also: I'm super grateful for the dot world group that allows me to have a Sharkey account that actually works as intended (thanks @ruud )!

🔗​: https://news.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-316-realist-edition/

#MySoCalledSudoLife #SelfHosting