For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:
• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)
• Gnome Devhelp².
• Zeal³
• RFC archive⁴ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁵.
I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want.
Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky.
I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be firefly) but god knows i wasted quite a bit of my time setting up stuffs that eventually broke and that i just abandoned.
Today I’m very happy with paying for stuff if the company is respecting privacy and has descent pricing.
Larrikin · 18m ago
What project did you run into issues with? I've found any project that has gotten to the point of offering a Docker Compose seems to just work.
Plus I've found nearly every company will betray your trust in them at some point so why even give them the chance? I self host Home Assistant, but they seem to be the only company that actively enacts legal barriers for themselves so if Paulus gets hit by a bus tomorrow the project can't suddenly start going against the users.
larodi · 2h ago
Can definitely become a trend given so many devs out there and so much that AI can produce at home which can be of arbitrary code quality…
ryandrake · 2h ago
> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it.
Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.
weitendorf · 1h ago
It introduces some pretty important risks of its own though. If you accidentally delete/forget a local private key or lose your primary email domain there is no recourse. It's significantly easier to set up 2FA and account recovery on a third party service
Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't self-host email or anything else. But it's probably more risky for 99% of people compared to just making sure they can recover their accounts.
elashri · 1h ago
I have seen much more stories about people losing access to their Gmail because of a comment flagged somewhere else (i.e YouTube) than people losing access to their domains (it is hard to miss all these reminders about renewal and you shouldn't wait until then anyway so that's something under you control).
And good luck getting anyone from Google to solve your problem assuming you get to a human.
JoshTriplett · 54m ago
Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers.
Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.
doubled112 · 47m ago
This is my plan.
I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.
However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.
JoshTriplett · 44m ago
> I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.
I back up all my email every day, independent of my hosting provider. I have an automatic nightly sync to my laptop, which happens right before my nightly laptop backups.
ozim · 1h ago
Self hosting at home - what is higher risk? Your HDD dying or losing Gmail account?
Oh now you don’t only self host, now you have to have space to keep gear, plan backups, install updates, oh would be good to test updates so some bug doesn’t mess your system.
Oh you know installing updates or while backups are running it would be bad if you have power outage- now you need a UPS.
Oh you know what - my UPS turned out to be faulty and it f-up my HDD in my NAS.
No I don’t have time to deal with any of it anymore I have other things to do with my life ;)
johnea · 1h ago
Nice article!
It's heartening in the new millennium to see some younger people show awareness of the crippling dependency on big tech.
Way back in the stone ages, before instagram and tic toc, when the internet was new, anyone having a presence on the net was rolling their own.
It's actually only gotten easier, but the corporate candy has gotten exponentially more candyfied, and most people think it's the most straightforward solution to getting a little corner on the net.
Like the fluffy fluffy "cloud", it's just another shrink-wrap of vendor lockin. Hook 'em and gouge 'em, as we used to say.
There are many ways to stake your own little piece of virtual ground. Email is another whole category. It's linked to in the article, but still uses an external service to access port 25. I've found it not too expensive to have a "business" ISP account, that allows connections on port 25 (and others).
Email is much more critical than having a place to blag on, and port 25 access is only the beginning of the "journey". The modern email "reputation" system is a big tech blockade between people and the net, but it can, and should, be overcome by all individuals with the interest in doing so.
holoduke · 1h ago
I spend quite some years with linux systems, but i am using llms for configurating systems a lot these days. Last week i setup a server for a group of interns. They needed a docker kubernetes setup with some other tooling. I would have spend at least a day or two to set it up normally. Now it took maybe an hour. All the configurations, commands and some issues were solved with help of chatgpt. You still need to know your stuff, but its like having a super tool at hand. Nice.
haiku2077 · 53m ago
Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.
SoftTalker · 20m ago
Isn't depending on Claude to administer your systems rather divergent from the theme of "Self-Host and Tech Independence?"
iforgotpassword · 11m ago
I think it's just a turbo mode for figuring things out. Like posting to a forum and getting an answer immediately, without all those idiots asking you why you even want to do this, how software X is better than what you are using etc.
Obviously you should have enough technical knowledge to do a rough sanity check on the reply, as there's still a chance you get stupid shit out of it, but mostly it's really efficient for getting started with some tooling or programming language you're not familiar with. You can perfectly do without, it just takes longer. Plus You're not dependent on it to keep your stuff running once it's set up.
It raised some interesting questions:
- How long can I be productive without the Internet?
- What am I missing?
The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad).
Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what I need and being offline really improve my productivity.
[1] https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/devdocs
[2] https://zealdocs.org/
• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)
• Gnome Devhelp².
• Zeal³
• RFC archive⁴ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁵.
1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/
2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp
3. https://zealdocs.org/
4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/
5. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc
Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky.
I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be firefly) but god knows i wasted quite a bit of my time setting up stuffs that eventually broke and that i just abandoned.
Today I’m very happy with paying for stuff if the company is respecting privacy and has descent pricing.
Plus I've found nearly every company will betray your trust in them at some point so why even give them the chance? I self host Home Assistant, but they seem to be the only company that actively enacts legal barriers for themselves so if Paulus gets hit by a bus tomorrow the project can't suddenly start going against the users.
Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.
Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't self-host email or anything else. But it's probably more risky for 99% of people compared to just making sure they can recover their accounts.
And good luck getting anyone from Google to solve your problem assuming you get to a human.
Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.
I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.
However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.
I back up all my email every day, independent of my hosting provider. I have an automatic nightly sync to my laptop, which happens right before my nightly laptop backups.
Oh now you don’t only self host, now you have to have space to keep gear, plan backups, install updates, oh would be good to test updates so some bug doesn’t mess your system.
Oh you know installing updates or while backups are running it would be bad if you have power outage- now you need a UPS.
Oh you know what - my UPS turned out to be faulty and it f-up my HDD in my NAS.
No I don’t have time to deal with any of it anymore I have other things to do with my life ;)
It's heartening in the new millennium to see some younger people show awareness of the crippling dependency on big tech.
Way back in the stone ages, before instagram and tic toc, when the internet was new, anyone having a presence on the net was rolling their own.
It's actually only gotten easier, but the corporate candy has gotten exponentially more candyfied, and most people think it's the most straightforward solution to getting a little corner on the net.
Like the fluffy fluffy "cloud", it's just another shrink-wrap of vendor lockin. Hook 'em and gouge 'em, as we used to say.
There are many ways to stake your own little piece of virtual ground. Email is another whole category. It's linked to in the article, but still uses an external service to access port 25. I've found it not too expensive to have a "business" ISP account, that allows connections on port 25 (and others).
Email is much more critical than having a place to blag on, and port 25 access is only the beginning of the "journey". The modern email "reputation" system is a big tech blockade between people and the net, but it can, and should, be overcome by all individuals with the interest in doing so.
Obviously you should have enough technical knowledge to do a rough sanity check on the reply, as there's still a chance you get stupid shit out of it, but mostly it's really efficient for getting started with some tooling or programming language you're not familiar with. You can perfectly do without, it just takes longer. Plus You're not dependent on it to keep your stuff running once it's set up.