Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
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Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
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I have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn't a strong historical context that can be referenced.
On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don't know what a good solution is.
Maybe a compromise would be (on user "delete") to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user's history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.
If you post something to a federated platform, it is literally never deleted. There is no privacy to be gained from deleting posts from the fediverse.
If people want to ask something that they don't want tied to them, they should use a throwaway account. Scrapers will probably grab the text quickly (especially if they're using ActivityPub) so it's a false sense of security to do it days later.
I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don't want to share their posts and people willing to provide individual help. They could find each other and DM a conversation. Milking a public forum for advice and then vandalizing it by deleting the post is definitely NOT a good solution, and I do not share your sympathy for people who do that. It's like curtaining off a few back rows of a bus to use all day as an office - although that could have been funny in a Seinfeld episode.
That would be any freelancing hiring platform.
I spent many years as a software dev contractor working through agencies, but I still don't see the parallel.
I mean if you want personal, private, ad-hoc support, hire someone to work for you personally.
And yet free opensource software exists. Lots of knowledgeable people are happy to help others during their free time.
It's me, I'm people
There are good reasons for hiding a paper trail. Specifically in a self-hosting community, I understand operators wanting to hide their particular technical details from those who would wish to target them. This can be government agencies who like to arrest or kill dissidents, or freelance assholes who just like to attack queer infra where they can. I don't think deleting posts is particularly effective, and the privacy concerns would be better addressed with a safe alt or a burner account, but I get why some people do it. Privacy is hard and when the stakes are high, people tend to over-secure rather than risk under-securing.