Re: I don't want to host services (but I do)
No offense but it kind of sounds like you don't want to do this. you're not in it for the love of the game, man, you're not searching for deus ex machina. you've also conflated self-hosting or communal hosting with running an open-registration service on the public internet; you don't need to hurt yourself in that way.
At the individual scale, self-hosting is not a good way to “be in control of my data.”
It’s like saying I do a vegetable garden to be in control of my food. I need much more than I can grow, it’s an inefficient use of my time, and I’m one bad season away from losing it all.
Resilience and transparency are key to be in control of my data and I can’t achieve this alone. This is a social problem, we need to bring solutions as a society.
there are definitely staples i plan to always outsource like email and potatoes. i trade veggies and produce with the folks in my meditation group and at work, though, and get high quality greens from a local CSA I met at the farmer's market. but yeah you buy your carbs and your staples because your time is valuable.
I thought this was compelling a compelling point on this person's mastodon but he's so down on this that i think he should get a better hobby than whatever this is.
It is a good practice to test major updates in a staging environment first, to find out and resolve potential issues before they impact the services actually used by your audience. This means you should either have a staging environment or spin one up that matches your production closely enough.
no it doesn't. this is not your job. this is not a thing that needs four nines. i really don't think a self-hoster should be concerned with high-availability.
we have to get our "self-hosted" infrastructure in to the hands of our friends and families, it has to be communal. who the fuck are "users" if you're self-hosting? you can choose who you give accounts to, you don't have to martyr yourself like this dude. run a server with 25 users, i dare you.
i have geographically distributed point-in-time disaster recovery backups w/ a few friends where we buy a mildly used drive off of diskprices.com, partition it 70-80% unencrypted ext4 for media & interesting files to share and 30% luks encrypted partition for personal backups as well as restic->backblaze backups that i basically trust for application data.
i would love to have some software that automated setting disks up like this but ENOTIME.
the next time i take a sabbatical i'm gonna 1) refactor my self-hosting stack to support oidc single sign on whatever app i can 2) buy five mid-range android devices preconfigured with five accounts to give to my family members 3) set up regular harddrive swaps with more friends.
Kolektiva dot social is not the same as a ten-user nextcloud & pixelfed thing paired with a fastmail family plan. your family and friends can survive your network being flaky for a few days. you simply do not need high availability you just need to be able to recover in less than a week or two. i could do that today with hardware i have in my house if my server failed, or i could get one put together quickly on cloud if there was an incident.
The Complete Computing Environment documents most of it for me and my backup plan is basically solid if slow/staggered
NEXT SSO for CCE
NEXT fastmail family plan?
NEXT buy devices for my family
preconfigure them for the self-hosted stuff 5x private-service family hosting plan
NEXT Dumb Ideas Done Dirt Cheap: a script that configures an attached disk for mailing to friends
you're mailing these to other linux self-hosters and HTPC freak so they just need to be legible on linux
70%-80% unencrypted ext4 volume for media you don't mind sharing/being public. music, tv shows, amvs, intersting PDFs, your open source code
the rest is a cryptsetup volume with a long password and/or a FIDO2 key. do with that what you will. application backups, personal effects
Interlinks
Archive Rebuild of The Complete Computer 0x01: You Can (Not) Compute