I believed we were better than Reddit… I truly believe this should be a BASIC feature. On Reddit you have to manually delete every single post, if you forget to do that basically your entire posts and comments history will be online forever…

I know there’s still internet archive ecc ecc ecc, but still I believe this should just be an activitypub feature, not something to be managed by single platforms.

I have tried every possible set up, I’ve got to say that the best one so far for me is sychthing + Koreader: dead simple, no databases, synchs annotations and highlights as well, books are simply epub files + metadata.

Aka no dealing with exports, database corruption or stuff like that.

In my experience matrix is a total mess with plenty of bugs, also uses quite a lot server resources. xmpp is lighter, easier to set up and works flawlessly, and seem also easier to proxy or do stuff like that with it. Calls are kinda messy to set up tho.

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Self hosting IS hard, don’t beat yourself too much because of it… After all you’re trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it’s okay to feel frustrated sometimes.

I think essentially I would like to achieve something like this

Thank you for your answer!

Yes I’ve considered using Hugo data sources, but handling all events in one single data file is not really a good way to manage data because Hugo can’t programmatically generate content pages from a single data file sadly… Also again, even if I make a script able to do this, I don’t think you can modify content when already created without handling single posts individually.

I could generate a “list of events” but not individual pages from it and not an RSS feed for posts which I would need for newsletters etc…

The thing with CSV is that I kinda lost track of where the actual updated data is, so I’m keeping that updated too, yeah I know I’m a mess.

All the stuff cited is needed for one single job essentially: contacts, newsletter, events… Which is gathering self published and externally published events and sending them to a list of chosen emails + some integration with social medias.

I’m not a webdev and I thought I could solve this much more easily, but I think doing this correctly would involve using at least an headless CMS + something that is able to grab data from external APIs + some JS framework for building the frontend.

Or relying on a ready full CMS like Ghost or WordPress + theme and hosting on a VPS, which honestly is what I’m leaning towards…

I want to avoid JS if possible as I had terrible coding experiences with it, I know some Rust but webdev in rust is not really a good option from what I’ve learned.

What do you think?

How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?

I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it’s still pretty buggy…

Do you think a Proxy would be better in this regard compared to a firewall? I was trying to watch the logs of ufw today and see if I could do something there but the incoming and outgoing connections are A LOT, and I would essentially like to whitelist both per domain and per IP.

How much maintainance would this require? I wonder how often IPs change today, but with all the NAT, dynamic DNS and CDNs there around maintaining a whitelist only with IP addresses looks like a nightmare…

Squid proxy with squidguard could be a better option than trying to work with a forewall maybe?

Any suggestions on the how?

It looks really complicated, very different from Linux! I cannot understand properly all the sandboxing thing… But I guess it’s years of development and policies enforcement… Now I can see why Android it’s much more closed compared to a normal Linux distro, I guess this provides a lot of security but less customization. I also have to understand the role of the device manager in all of this. Is there any Linux distro that behaves similarly?

Why so much effort into securing it? Isn’t the Linux behaviour with users etc enough?

No it’s more a user management thing, I would need users to access a certain list of whitelisted websites only…

Maybe proxy or dns? I’ve been looking in squid proxy but it looks fairly complicated, especially if I wanna be able to access it from wan… But Idk if with DNS I could block ips as well. Setting up an hosts file seems like a lot of continuous work since I would have to specify entries for each ip address associated with domain… Maybe firewall?

Enough focus to read documentation.

That’s really it. If your purpose is just self hosting learning bash could also be helpful. And yeah Linux would be a great choice.

But mostly, if you want to self host an instance of Nextcloud correctly and without having to deal with too many unexpected things, you have to read the documentation and do not rush. Most self hosted stuff isn’t “install and use”, because you’ll be your own server manager, and everything requires attention to be managed.

Docker or not docker you will have to deal with configuration, settings, requirements and updates.

So understanding how to read the docs/search and open github issues and taking time to read everything would be the most important skill for me.

Also writing down what you are doing would indeed be helpful too, in order not to lose track of what you’re doing on your server. (Check out Ansible).

Most apps out there simply need you to know about permissions, systemctl services and package managers.

Try to always find a specific package for your distro for everything you install (eg. .deb for Debian), and have strategies when this is not possible (aka using a Python venv when installing python programs).

That looks way more than a home server, it looks like something i would expect to see for a small business!