hendrik

Maybe you can use letsencrypt’s DNS-01 challenge. That works without an HTTP connection. But ultimately, I don’t think you need a certificate on the server, doesn’t Cloudflare tunnel the traffic unencrypted and terminate the HTTPS on their side?

yunohost has a dedicated page in the admin ui for you to configure your domains and certificates. default is a self-signed one unless you generate a proper one

Last time I checked, all the regular harddisk manufacturers were kind of similar in reliability. You can get lucky or unlucky with a specific model series or specific drive… But it’s not like there was a manufacturer to recommend which outperforms the other ones.

(Though the hdds aren’t all the same. There are definitely smaller and bigger ones, fast and very slow ones, some meant for 24/7 operation and consumer drives.)

Kdeconnect. Alternatively NextCloud or sending an email to myself.

You nailed it.

And if someone wants to install lots of random stuff, there’s always: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

You’re right. I finished reading their website only after commenting. Guess I’m not their target audience then. I prefer doing encryption on my device, as most of my regular mails come in unsecure and unencrypted anyways. And I guess we’d have to replace email in it’s entirety with a more modern protocol to make it secure and usable. I mean my bank, internet service provider and almost everyone stopped sending me invoices, bills etc via mail already years ago. And it’s not like they offer to do it via Tuta secure mail… So I guess all of these services are niche and limited by the trade-offs they need to invent.

Ah, alright. I was more thinking of getting a paid subscription anyways. At least the lower tier for 36€ a year seems fair. Though I wish they also offered chat and a few other services as well. Btw, if you’re technically inclined… There are tools like imapsync which do this for any mail provider. Or with Evolution or Thunderbird as a mail client, I believe you can just select all your mails and drag and drop them into a different mailbox. That should get it done as well. (Edit: No IMAP)

Tuta Mail plus Mullvad?

I think collaboration is another thing that’s missing in your answer. Of course synchronization would be one main thing for me to use a photo gallery or note taking app across devices, since I’m often accessing stuff from my phone and my laptop. But I also like to share photos with my relatives and friends, I have shared calendars with my wife to organize our lives. I collaborate on projects and collaborative edit text documents. And sometimes I keep notes and small snippets on technical details mainly for myself, but also share that with the internet, for other people to learn how to install some software or customize it to a niche use-case. And while some of that could be done by separate applications as well, I often use one generic self-hosted platform and have that do everything, disregarding if some of the job doesn’t really need the features. It’s a balance. I’m also sometimes wasting resources and in the end I realize I never needed a self-hosted solution and I would have been better off with a simple and local phone app.

I think I’d be fine with that. I’m using lots of Free Software projects, have Linux on my computers, wifi router, use random projects and Fediverse platforms … So far every time one of my passwords got leaked it was some breach of a proprietary platform (last.fm, Facebook, …) while the Free Software has served me extraordinary well. Usually it even limits the insatiable hunger for private data those commercial platforms have…

WhatsApp disconnects you if you don’t open the official app every 14 days or so. So you definitely need it. I run it on an old tablet. It’s supposed to run in a virtual machine (running Android) as well.

Those are certainly valid points. But do I want to care about that? Honest question… Discord also doesn’t care about my privacy. Or making the internet a better place. So I think -in turn- I feel quite alright to ignore whatever client they like me to use. And their exact ToS.

What’s with the “taxing for large and active Discord servers”? Does it lead to issues if I’m not using their Electron app or website? I can’t imagine where this additional strain on their servers would come from?! I run my own homeserver, by the way. So I shouldn’t weigh down on anyone else’s server…

Thank you very much. I’m going to set it up then.

Thx. So far the mautirx ones have worked flawlessly for me. I got blocked once, years ago by WhatsApp when I first set it up. No issues after that, so I’m not really afraid of getting banned. And I’m not planning to use the apps or website much after I got the bridge running. That is if it offers all the features and I don’t have a reason anymore to log in myself…

I was thinking of mautrix/discord. Is that the one you use?

Would you recommend the Discord bridge? I’ve always wanted to install that as well. Is there anything I want to know before putting in the effort to install and configure it?

Sure, it’s just a proxy/forwarder. I mean I kind of see your point. But I don’t think I agree on the word “usefulness”. In practice, for an average person, it has the exact same effect, no matter if you pick an intermediary, caching DNS server, or recursively look it up, starting at the root. It returns the same answer and the same webpage opens. With the one requirement that you need to pick an DNS server which doesn’t mess with the results. But that’s not a huge issue, there are quite some uncensored DNS servers out there. Like the OpenNIC ones for example.

But I don’t want to talk you out of it. Originally, it was frowned upon querying the root DNS servers. Since it puts more strain on them and the very core of the internet. And it’s a bit more inefficient for you, since your DNS server needs to store more database information and do more queries from a residential internet connection which might be slower than a server in a datacenter. But a lot has changed since DNS got invented and I think it’s probably fine to run a full, recursive DNS server at home these days.

So enjoy your unhindered internet access. For the other people who don’t want to run a full DNS server, I can recommend opennic.org And I think it’s really a shame that lots of ISPs mess with the DNS results and introduce third-party blocklists. Mine does that, too.

Blocky is another nice AdBlocker and DNS proxy. I’ve been using it for quite a while. Seems to be pretty efficient, too. If you’re looking at community DNS servers, have a look at https://opennic.org/ that’s a democratic DNS root.

And by the way, take care not to expose your DNS server to the public internet, or some people will start using it for DNS amplification attacks. But that shouldn’t be any concern if you run it on a Raspberry Pi at home.

Sure. I think that’s a valid use case. Maybe use one of the community fine-tunes for that… 😆

Instruct it to be your dungeon master and do some roleplay.