@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.

do any of you have some tips or resources on where to start in regards to hosting a (probably single-user or inv-only) instance? not so much fundamental stuff like linux/docker/etc more like which software to pick and maybe some guides surrounding that #askfedi #selfhosting

What top level domain do you use for your self hosted home services? I am considering .home or .lan.

#selfhosting

No AI being used here

Also: #RunYourOwnMailServer

#selfhosting #email #openbsd #opensmtpd

Alt...

Meme picture How they want my mailserver to look: [Exchange logo] Hos my mailserver actually looks: [hand holding up a small server-type machine]

I now have ten pages of instances that my instance knows about, and yet it still can't find this one. I've added a whole mess of relays, is there anything else I can do to encourage faster federation?

#selfhosting

@cavanholi #selfhosting all the way

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

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

In early September, The Matrix Foundation homeserver went down.

I'm extremely proud of our SRE team. They had a Disaster Recovery Plan and monthly exercises to apply it, resulting in no data loss despite a 24h outage.

I've learned a lot about how to properly backup/restore a Postgres database when writing this post with SREs. We also learned how to better prevent and be resilient to human error.

Thanks all for the hugops during the outage!

https://matrix.org/blog/2025/10/post-mortem/

#homelab #selfHosting #sre

🏕️ 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

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

Yesterday evening just before going to sleep I installed #pihole on #raspberrypi 5. The process was straight forward and it works like a charm. It neatly blocks advertisements for all devices in my local network. It also blocked #youtube adds to my surprise.

I am actually considering donating to support #pihole.

https://pi-hole.net

#pihole #raspberrypi #SelfHosting #Linux

Good morning Fedi friends and happy Saturday! 🌈​

File under: I'm such a clown sometimes. I did something extremely foolish yesterday (installation-wise) that bricked my whole YunoHost with Sharkey instance. This is not the fault of YunoHost or Sharkey, it's just me being the biggest airhead.

So this morning I nuked that VPS (Hetzner makes it so easy to start and stop) and, armed with a stopwatch, I wanted to see how long it would take me to order a new server, log in, install YunoHost and set up a main URL and a subdomain to log in.

I had this unique challenge that we're going hiking in the mountains so my time is very limited this morning.

How long did it take me? A grand total of 14 minutes.

The perks of being a fool is that you repeat the steps so many times that you go from being terrified (what do I have to do now?) to just sailing through the steps.

Time went like this:

1m30s: logged onto Hetzner, ordered a new server (Debian v12)

4m50s in: logged in, increased security, ran apt update and apt upgrade

5m in: installed YunoHost (thanks #curl)

7m30s in: with YunoHost successfully installed, I got into their beautiful graphical interface to continue the post install

9m30s in: post installation complete

11m 20s in: began tweaking DNS records for the main domain and the logging in subdomain, installed certificates, etc.

14m23s = all done, tripled checked that everything is working in incognito mode (it is) 🥳​

Wishing you all a great day. Time to go hiking for me and my fam 🗻​

#MySoCalledSudoLife #selfhosting

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.

When I select a VPS how do I know that my data on the server is safe and private? Is trust all I've got?

#SelfHosting #VPS #Linux

Good morning Fedi friends!

Earlier today I installed #DeltaChat to give it a try... and I'm currently flashing the #YunoHost disk image on a card for my #RaspberryPi5 - so I can write about the process.

Super grateful for the world of #FOSS ❤️​

Have a great day everyone!

#MySoCalledSudoLife #selfhosting

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

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting: day 300 (new project edition) 💡

a blog post that discusses my next self-hosting project. a hint: it's not fediverse-related but is still very empowering.

🔗​: https://news.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-300-new-project-edition/

#MySoCalledSudoLife #Jellyfin

Days since the last "kid shut down the server by pressing the shiny button" incident: 0

#homelab #selfHosting

Curious about Raspberry Pi and Tailscale? Discover how to transform your Raspberry Pi into a subnet router and exit node, enhancing your self-hosting capabilities. Dive into this slice of delicious Pi and explore the possibilities! #RaspberryPi #Tailscale #selfhosting

https://youtu.be/dneNjDu4HKU

Okay, this has been bugging me ever since I started self-hosting. I still don't know. What exactly are the differences, in application, between SQLite and PostgreSQL? More specifically, what can PostgreSQL do that SQLite can't (or vice versa)?

#SelfHosting #Database #SQL #SQLite #PostgreSQL

That #Peertube instance is the place to spend your time, instead of letting them grind you down with new rituals of doom at the neutered #TikTok
What Peertube instance? The one you are #selfhosting that's the best one, always! It is not that hard, and people will help you.
@stefano

The EU Chat Control thing, and the fascism in the USA, should make self-hosting and open-source much more popular with the masses.

It is long overdue for the general public to take the Internet back from corporations, like it used to be. Made by us, for us.

Fascist regimes and corporations won't survive if people simply.......stop using them.

#fascism #chatcontrol #eu #authoritarianism #spying #spyware #surveillance #selfhosting #opensource

Dear Fedi friends,

Thank you for adopting #GratefulForYou and filling up my feed with so many shout-outs to amazing Fediverse people.

Today my #GratefulForYou nod goes to @ilja and @shollyethan for encouraging me to start my #selfhosting journey.

ilja was the first person who ever mentioned @yunohost to me (SUPER GRATEFUL for them too!) and Ethan told me: "you learn by doing things" (so true).

This self-hosting journey is incredibly empowering. I feel like a new person, 9 months in ❤️ 🙏 ✨

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting: day 275 (coping mechanisms edition) ​​

World events being what they are, authoritarianism, technofeudalism and other everyday horrors are pushing me to spin up another server on Hetzner with the excuse "well, I've gotten so many requests to show what's it's like to install YunoHost, this is the perfect opportunity."

Self-hosting is a pretty good distraction from the ​ (dumpster FIRES) going off everywhere. At least for me. Top 3 coping mechanism (top 1: playing with my child; top 2: aromatherapy).

I may do it next week 🙈​

I hope you're having a nice day. Chin up! Resist! Enjoy the little things 🌸​🍵​🌈​

#MySoCalledSudoLife

In our quest to move away from GitHub, we have a working self-hosted cgit instance as well as a runner for CI.

The last missing piece is to find a way to safely expose it to the world.

Are there any good Cloudflare alternatives to protect the origin?

Tor works fine, but I would like to also be reachable from the clearnet.

#SelfHosting #DevOps #FediHelp