my web

In recent years I've become disillusioned with 3rd party hosted web services. I don't like:

• tracking & advertisements
• lack of control over where my data is physically stored
• lack of control over what is served to people who visit my pages
• privacy policies
• data breaches
• nebulous copyrights
• getting logged out constantly
• constantly changing UIs
• bait and switch (free to paid)
• lock-in
• incredible journeys
• google

Consequently I've been steadily migrating to hosting everything I need myself. At this point the only things I don't self host are email and Github, which is just a portfolio piece these days.

My choices in software lean heavily towards stability, sometimes at the expense of my other technological values of elegance and minimalism. Fun as it is, I have other stuff to do than play sysadmin in my limited free time. For the same reason everything is dockerized as a hard requirement, so I prefer software with good support for that already.

I wrote a technical overview of how I run all this crap if it interests you.

An overview of what I self host to follow.

This stuff is only accessible on my personal intranet.

• archivebox - personal Wayback Machine. Kinda like bookmarks for data hoarders.
• gitea - personal git server. Like a lightweight Gitlab.
• healthchecks - cron monitoring. I use this primarily to monitor backups on my devices, so I get emailed if backups start failing.
• invidious - youtube frontend. Video browsing free of engineered distraction. Combined with a compatible mobile client (such as Yattee) it also achieves ad-free youtube on iOS without resorting to jailbreaks.
• miniflux - rss reader. I probably need a better solution for RSS - probably a mobile app - as I rarely check it.
• nextcloud* - calDAV, cardDAV, task tracking. The kitchen sink of self hosting, but most of the apps it has aren't great compared to dedicated software. I use it primarily for calDAV and cardDAV. Heavier than what I need for those applications but it's nice to be able to try out nextcloud apps when I hear about them
• photoprism - personal photo server. The GOAT. Photoprism has it all - CV content tagging & face recognition, manual tagging, RAW rendering, sidecar handling, location & map views, calendar views, albums, comprehensive search, pleasant design & obsessive core devs.
• quassel core* - IRC bouncer
• tandoor - recipe book; capable of extracting recipes from web urls, similar functionality to justtherecipe et al
• text-generation-webui - locally hosted LLMs. Super convenient, just plug in the model name on huggingface and it will download it and serve a chatbot-style web UI
• Monica - personal CRM. Lets me track things about people I know - birthdays, pets, kids, s/o's, significant life events, things like that. Can send email reminders of things as well. I'm a very forgetful guy and this helps me keep up my relationships with others. Probably will replace Nextcloud cardDAV for me at some point

All the stuff you can get to on the web.

• akkoma - fedi microblogging. That means twitter for you normies mainstream folks. https://social.qlyoung.net/
• dokuwiki - wiki. You're on it.
• maloja - scrobbles. It shows you what music I've been listening to, when I listen to it on clients that support reporting that information. https://maloja.qlyoung.net/
• peertube - video hosting. Fediverse native via ActivityPub. Supports remote transcoding & S3 compatible storage for videos; consequently can be a very cost efficient platform for self hosting video (think < $20/mo). https://qtube.qlyoung.net/
• piwigo - photo gallery. There are lighter options, but I like the album management interface and built in support for plugins and themes. Very stable. https://photos.qlyoung.net/
• matrix* - chat server. Kind of a huge pain in the ass to self host, but once set up, you can plug almost every other chat program in the world into it - even stuff like facebook messenger and whatsapp. Largely eliminates chat platform conversations.

  @qlyoung:qlyoung.net

*Observant readers will note that not all of this stuff is/need be web based