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. Heavier than what I need for *DAV 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

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