gkak.laₛ

Reminder of this:

https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/

And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured docker-compose.yml and buy their domain etc)

Each server has its own users and communities (but they still all talk and subscribe to each other!)

Usually I see usernames written in the form @user@lemmy.zip, while communities !InterestingSubject@lemmy.zip

Welcome to the platform!

• You signed up for the lemmy.zip server (=“lemmy instance”), but you can see posts, post comments, and talk to users from any other server. Just like you can send email from your personal email to your work email, it’s still just email! Other than the fact that usernames have a i.e. “@lemmy.zip” part, you shouldn’t really need to think about it 😅 (But when you want to login to your account, you can’t login to another server, you need to login on lemmy.zip)
• No need to learn much more to get started, you just participate in any discussions you want etc 😊
• You can find some communities to subscribe to at https://sub.rehab/ and https://lemmyverse.net/communities . To subscribe to a community, you can search for the community’s full name on your server, lemmy.zip
• Here you can find a mobile app to download: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/ . You can download whichever you want! You can just try them and pick the one you like the most, and you can have a couple of them at the same time and they still access the same content
• Lemmy.zip also has a list in the sidebar, “Useful links”, these four are just alternative websites you can use to access the same thing; again you can just pick whichever you like the most!

Yes, it’s pretty good! I’m a DevOps engineer, and have experience with Ansible, Docker, etc, but I just couldn’t find time to deploy services the best way that I wanted™ for my personal server

So, even though it e.g. doesn’t even use Docker, yunohost really helped me start using the many services I wanted/needed, which otherwise might take e.g. a few hours to a couple of days for each of them to research and configure

So I have one “production” yunohost server, one “testing” yunohost server to test services that I don’t know if I’ll use yet (and I wouldn’t want them to interfere with production e.g. by using too many resources)

and one server without yunohost for mailu, Docker, traefik, etc, which I can use to deploy services the correct way™ as I figure out the services that I really use and find the time to migrate them one-by-one

Even when using yunohost, there are so many things to do after deploying a service (e.g. DNS, configure the server and client software), so it has been really useful to save time when deploying and configuring.

I think it gets you ~80% there, makes self-hosting accessible to everyone, and helps democratize the Internet a bit 💚 It’s more important to have many people setting up e.g. Immich or Nextcloud for their family photos, than only a few Linux people being able to learn how to do it perfectly (Docker/kubernetes high availability, reverse proxies, etc) and have everyone else to need to resort to using centralized services

You could try something like YunoHost to get started! It’s kind of a one-click deployment platform for self-hosting, ready to use with user management, reverse proxy with SSL, somewhat preconfigured services to choose from, etc.

Ideally you can also learn the tools needed like Docker, Ansible, etc, but with yunohost and a SBC (e.g. RaspberryPi), or a €5/month VPS (easier if you want to access your services publicly), you will have a ready-to-use boilerplate that you can start building on.

Learning all the individual technologies at the same time might be overwhelming at the beginning, but something like yunohost will allow you over time to learn all the stuff around the deployment itself, e.g. how domains and DNS records work, how the SSL certificates are generated, which services you would like to set up and use, the configuration needed for these services individually, etc. And at the same time you can start using a few useful services!

Then, as you start learning, you could start setting up services one-by-one manually with e.g. Docker, either at the same server or a new one.

Don’t forget to look for the admin documentation for each software you’re setting up (e.g. Nextcloud etc). And look at awesome-selfhosted, it’s a list of more resources and software to use and deploy!

Good luck and have fun!

(Edit: There are some yunohost alternatives you might want to look into, but most of what I found either had a very small selection of software, or had a subscription service etc that they want to sell you, while limiting what you can do on your own server)

Signal has good encryption etc, is centralized, afaik needs Google Play Services except if you use Molly; but I think it’s a bit more mainstream and simple to use for end-users

SimpleX also seems to have good encryption, post-quantum etc, and is anonymous and doesn’t even use user identifiers (they explain why that’s good on their website), so it could be good for occasional more sensitive conversations or sth (but I see people struggling with onboarding when installing it, and I still get confused by the UX sometimes). It’s kind of not even decentralized, more like peer-to-peer, with servers to just cache messages when you’re offline, I think.

Personally for day-to-day I prefer to use Matrix with Element: decentralized (which I really value for competition and user choice), e2e, and has good support for creating communities etc, so I’m lucky to have it as our main chat platform for work, and I’ve been using it for years in our hackerspace and personal chats etc. I see end-users still struggling sometimes with onboarding, but if they’re close friends/family I usually need to set it up for them anyway