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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I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.
Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.
Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.
Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”
So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.
I think a possibility is a series of open source anvil or nixos scripts that you can run on most hardware with minimal changes, in an extendable architecture of some kind to add or remove functionality and they perhaps get maintained by the community or some structure of the kind of Linux distributions.
This could enable people with minimal skills set up and maintain a reasonably useful but secure environment just by changing a few variables.
What's a nixos script?
Nixos is an os that’s defined by its config stored in .nix files. Everything is defined here all the software and configurations. Two people with the same script will have the exact same os.
Any changes you make that aren’t in the scripts won’t be present when you reboot.
You could maintain a very custom linux distribution (kinda) by just maintaining these config scripts.
So a user wouldn’t need to install all required software and dependencies. They could get a nixos and the self-host config and adjust some settings and have a working system straight after install.
A viable alternative is Guix, which uses Scheme for its scripts and could also use the Hurd kernel instead of Linux, but works the same.