I’m !selfhosted@lemmy.world all the way (even my email).
Highly recommend it, even if you start small with like just your calendar or something.
Even if you can’t self-host, maybe one of your friends can/does and would set you up on their stuff. I’ve got a handful of friends and family hooked into my stack (email, Nextcloud, Matrix, Lemmy, AdGuard DNS, etc).
You’ve just shared some data for free for anyone to use. Self-hosting doesn’t mean shit, my friend.
Yeah? That was the intention, lol. I self-host not because I’m a tinfoil hatter but because I want to be in charge of my own data.
I’m under no illusion that my public submissions can’t/won’t be scraped. My goal is simply to not give surveillance capitalists a mainline to my personal data nor allow myself to be turned into or used as a product to be mined and sold; I choose what I want to share. I put it out into the world, and whatever comes of it does (or doesn’t).
The difference is that only what I choose to share can be mined and not everything.
Fair enough. I just wanted to clarify that you’re aware.
My RAM weeps.I felt that lol.
Do you have a good “getting started” resource for self-hosting that you would point people to?
Not really, though there’s probably something like that out there. It’s more a collection of skills that build on each other, finding a problem to solve, and then solving it (with occasional detours along the way to fill in any knowledge gaps).
Basically, just stack these on top of each other:
- Learn basic Linux skills (I can’t in good conscious recommend hosting or even using Windows)
- Familiarize yourself with web standards. Don’t have to be an expert, just understand the basic concepts (web traffic is HTTP based, HTTP usually runs on port 80, HTTPS is secure/encrypted HTTP, don’t send passwords over HTTP, etc).
- Find a self-hosted project you’d like to play with. Usually you can just google “self hosted {thing}” such as “Self hosted trello”
- The previous step will typically land you on a Github or other project page. Review the docs for getting started on those.
- You’ll likely encounter terms or things you don’t understand. Detour to familiarize yourself with them.
- Follow the steps to get your first service up and running.
- Enjoy!
- Once you’re past that, you can fine tune, re-deploy in a better way, or otherwise optimize.
The next thing you decide to deploy will usually be easier and will further extend and cement the skills you’ve just used.
It’s definitely a process and collection of skills rather than just one monolithic thing, but each one builds off the other. There’s a learning curve, sure, but just reading the docs for different things will usually get you going or provide a “jumping off” point. e.g. Many services utilize Docker, so you’ll see that in a lot in the docs and probably end up detouring to learn the basics of working with it.
Some self-hostable applications do have easy deploy scripts which can definitely be good for beginners, but I tend to not like those as if/when something goes wrong, you’re ill-equipped to do any meaningful troubleshooting.
Members of various selfhosted communities are usually happy to help as long as you’re willing to learn; we typically don’t like to just do it for you lol.
