I love self-hosting a bunch of apps I use, so I don’t have to rely on anyone but my ISP for my digital life. Jellyfin, Immich, forgejo, memos and more.

But I know this isn’t for everyone. I just recently spent about 3 hours doing routine maintenance and fixing an issue (I caused) and I know not everyone is into doing that kind of thing.

I also wonder what it would take to get more people into this self-hosting thing. I.e., to get them off of subscription streaming services, Google, etc…, so they can own their own data, stop feeding the machine and for the general betterment of humanity. What would the world be like if half of all adults self-hosted their own services? Or even 25%?

So, for discussion, is increasing the number of self hosters a good idea? How can we make help that process along?

Edit: Fixed typos

  • @nshibjEnglish
    10•7 months ago

    I recently set up a small home server and started trying to self host stuff. I found it pretty hard to get started. People have been very helpful on this community and other public forums, but I’m afraid it’s often not enough. They give me advice in trying this or that, doing this and avoiding that… but I still don’t understand more than half of the concepts that they use. I consider myself tech literate above the average user: I recently switched to Linux (after years on MacOS, using the command line, and even building a couple of programs from source), I also installed a custom ROM on my phone. I feel comfortable learning and doing these things… but still felt very very lost when trying to self host a few services. At the moment I settled for a local-only network where I run Jellyfin, Navidrome and Syncthing on OpenMediaVault. I’m lost with what I’d need to do to access my server from outside my local network, and terrified of doing something wrong and leaving a hole open so any hacker can access my server. I’d like to do it some day, but I’d rather have a safe local network than screw and get my data stolen or deleted.

    So, in my opinion, we would need good tutorials or a MOOC to explain the basics from scratch.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•7 months ago

      I’m in a similar position but perhaps a few steps ahead. But still needing to regularly lookup things like “how do I do <basic thing like move a folder> in linux?”. The other reply mentions tailscale which I agree is the best for your use case, super simple set up, secure and free, you just need to run one command on the machine or VM and it guides you through the rest. There is an option to allow access to your local network as well (haven’t used it, but have seen it in options). Then it is just like connecting to a vpn from elsewhere to get access.

      The other alternative option you might want to explore is a cloudflare tunnel (I used the cloudflared docker container). You’ll need to buy a public domain and then that can redirect to a service you want (e.g. you could access jellyfin from ‘jellyfin.yourname.com’), I set up two-factor authentication which then only allows certain e-mails to get a code to login. This means you don’t need to connect to a VPN and can access from any machine and browser. I’ve used this for things like silverbullet and planka.

    • SeaJEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      I’m lost with what I’d need to do to access my server from outside my local network, and terrified of doing something wrong and leaving a hole open so any hacker can access my server. I’d like to do it some day, but I’d rather have a safe local network than screw and get my data stolen or deleted.

      Setup a VPN via Wireguard or Tailscale. I personally have not done that but I have VPN setup through OpenVPN which I did not find that hard and people say that is significantly harder than Wireguard.

      The other (less safe) option would be to setup a DMZ on your network for stuff you want to self host. That is a bit more involved though. I went through it for fun and setup a public Nextcloud instance along with DDNS and a reverse proxy. I was just messing around though and shut it down after testing performance.