Self-Hosted
Friday, February 24 2023, 00:12 UTC
As a privacy, open-source and in general tech enthusiast, about 2 or so years ago I started getting interested in self-hosting. I didn't like having my data going to some random datacenter and I figured it was a good way to start learning about the sysadmin's job.
Now 2 years later, I have a decent network infrastructure with a dedicated server running debian. I host my services using docker and to manage them better I use a combination of docker-compose and a useful TUI called lazydocker.
I run a good amount of services, main ones being: Jellyfin for movies, shows and music, Deluge as a torrent client, Vaultwarden for password management, xBrowserSyc to sync my bookmarks across devices, Trilium for taking notes, SearXNG as my search engine of choice, Nginx Proxy Manager as a reverse proxy, and finally, 2 apache webservers, one being this site the other one being a local dashboard for easy access to my other services.
So all of this to say what? Well I've been unhappy with Trilium, the web-ui is fine but it doesn't really translate well for the occasional note taken from my phone. In my search for an alternative I was (and still am) looking for something I could deploy on docker, that had an app or a decent way to work with it from mobile and obviously a good web-ui/desktop app. After some search I found Standard Notes, in terms of functionality it seemed a perfect fit for me, good mobile/desktop app and a way to host it via docker. So I started looking into it, only to find a a docker-compose file longer than Dante's Inferno. I thought: "weird, but there has to be an easier way to do it with less containers", well or so I hoped. I ended up finding this video.
To be clear I'm totally fine with them having paid tiers for the version they host on their
own servers, they have to pay the bills somehow. But claming that you're trying to incourage
self-hosting while having an overly complicated way of doing so, and then on top of that, adding
paid tiers to something you don't even host yourself. It's pretty obvious what they're trying to
accomplish, they're purposefully making self-hosting as hard and annoying as possible so that people
will rely on their official servers and pay full price for them.
What a way to ruin a good open-source project.