Date: 2024/12/22 - Where we at - Themes: Selfhosting, Social, Opinion

---

sorry?

I think i lost you on the themes of this article, but hear me out, i'm gonna talk about those 3 points. Because i wanted to talk about it before getting to year revied "First of year number" article. But i have energy lets have it now.

rewind

As you may know, this website is on the back of a Yunohost installed on a Thinkpad X220, bare metal install. Its the most reliable piece of hardware i met so far. It survived 3 places, 3 different ISPs with different flavor of rules, the hell of a server admin (that being me) and being abused in production because it was a company laptop. This install has now 4 years old i think. And some stuff has moved!

I know what i said about server admins before ref: Sleepless Nights 3 and i wrote that with all emotions i was going through. and i still hate doing administration of it. But Selfhosting is so conveiniant. By that i really mean it. I was clearly unaware of how comfortable it will be.

bootlicking POV

On this year i'll say my server had like 6 days of being unreachable. Fault on ISP. I admit Yunohost makes it simple. I'm thankful of the massive efforts of the team and community around it.

Majority of the times, my server works and that's all i ask for. I'm not seeking bleeding edge things with that setup. And so far that's why i still talk about this project in my IRL circle. Because its fairly simple. It makes a great entry point to selfhosting without getting all the hassle.

cleansing

So as said, selfhosting is nice.
This website is here, and it made me realize how little it takes to have this. Really mean it. I started HTML and CSS because i was genuinely interested, i wasn't into "Let's have the ugliest website and write every page a if God forgot why we invented CMSes" at first.

The whole thing of selfhosting made me change my interaction with stuff out there, like google drive. No ones except me has to know what's in my online drive.

One of those interactions have impact, not always good but when people have time to understand why such choices were made, they usually go along.

Like i got a quick filesharing tool called Jirafeau and i got that because i was looking for a quick solution so acquantances and mostly my family could quick sharing stuff around.
I was surprised to see my brother sharing me stuff more than one time with it.

Another exemple of this is, lately (early December 2024) i was chilling at the local community hackerspace/fablab and met someone that came here to do some image editing. And as she forgot her USB stick, she emailed the pictures to herself so she can retrieve them once on the lab's computers. But she wasn't able to, for no reason. She couldn't log on her mail account. She asked me to help.
Long story short we used my personnal drive to do so. And we talked about that. Being locked by her mail provider to log on 'public' computers. Then we opened that conversation a bit more because she wasn't using google gmail, asked her why.

And it was the same reason why i had a personnal online drive on my own server.

what's that website?

when i have people over, we often watch youtube, and for me it's really a no brainer i never think about how weird my youtube might be.

But i realize how fucked people are MORE THAN ONCE.

I couldn't spend a hour on youtube without an Ad Block and a way to sponsorblock. And i often watching videos that are more than 20 minute long! I know, for people that make videos 'as a job' i'm the worst maybe but the state of the website is so awful. Make that a job is poison.

Today i use a frontend hosted on my server, i'm not a total masochist even i would love the day Peertube would be a real option for people. (them consider PT as a viable option. Without second thoughts about, storage, hosting and ad revenue) BUT thing is, i'm not sure i would ever go back to today state of youtube.

I am that awkward person looking surprised and scared when i'm not at home

Wizardry

I've been called out only once of tinfoil hat activities and if that's the price of peace of mind i'll call myself a tinfoil wizard

Those are exemples of how selfhosting create wild situations. They also create opportunities, i loved browsing reddit, now reddit is a mess. i couldnt load one page without getting too much stuff on my plate to enjoy. I used a frontend and nowday i mostly browse a different thing called Lemmy which is some kind of 'federated' reddit.

The last point of selfhosting would be able to bringing people to it. That's some advanced spells i don't know about yet.

I only met the doomers, that acknoledge the whole web is doomed and wouldn't try otherwise.

End statements

But what does it take really?

In money, energy and internet subscription. It cost a bit more in personal energy though. But it worth it. Like, it's rewarding. I've made pages for my bicycles, and my little projects. it nothing but i did that!

I watched some videos about selfhosting after my first attempt to yunohost (that was on a Raspberry Pi, it went wrong but that was my fault), thing is most people deal with VPS. But hearing about Hetzner closing stuff without warning made me kinda suspicious.

It reinforcd my opinion on old hardware used as servers. I like to interact with something real. It make a great demo of what's internet's made of.