Situation: we live in europe, there’s PRISM and Privacy Shield and all that, to which selfhosting is the solution. Now, my sister, mostly on Apple, got concerned with all the hacks and privacy violations over the years. She’s a tech noob, so i can’t really recommend her prism-break.org
There’s a bunch of hosted solutions geared towards small to medium business, like Univention Corporate Server, NethServer, etc.
Are there similiar bundles for private use, basically Apple cloud alternative? With services like cloud storage, cloud office, media share, maybe chat, videocall?
Or should i let her wait until i got my box up, VPN her over? I’m only semi-professional tho.
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I made this mistake and hosted my mom’s webpage and email.
Anytime anything happened, she was on the phone to me complaining about how horrible it all was.
Email bounced because she got the address wrong? My fault. All the spam she got? My fault. Images were the wrong size on her webpage? My fault. Typo in a PDF she was sending to a client? My email server must have messed it up.
I could continue, but jesus christ, it was a disaster.
Never, ever, ever, ever host for family members unless you’re willing to put up with that kind of shit, because that’s what always happens.
Yep. I don’t recommend shit anymore to family members because it’s either:
a) not what they want (the proprietary service was better)
b) you will be doing damage control for the rest of your life
I don’t know. I run a Nextcloud instance for myself and I let my gf tag along. Why do you think people shouldn’t help their families out?
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I think this sums it up nicely.
The comment you replied to is a direct reply to the comment you linked - I don’t think it was intentional, but if it was, then I’d like to say it’s not a very helpful reply as OP already read it.
Sad that people with the knowledge won’t even consider the great opportunity it is to teach that knowledge to a family member.
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She might want to, who knows?
She wants privacy, maybe she’s not afraid of learning new things to get it. It is possible.
She’s in medicine and psychology, big brain but full with other things.
So it could take some time to teach her.
@Navigator @vzq That should probably be the first question then
It isn’t because he needs to be willing to teach in the first place. If a person don’t want to teach autonomy to another, the debate ends here.
But to know if you want to take the time to teach someone, you have to consider the possibility in the first place not thinking ‘impossible’ then move along.
Also we can debate on how to teach a family member without being overwhelmed, because it is a real topic of discussion.
As I am teaching myself right now maintainable selfhost setups using popular apps (admittedly with Kubernetes vs something minimal in functionality like Docker Desktop), there is a lot of complexity involved in getting these services both functional and maintainable while also having to consider the security implications of various setups.
While I agree the concept of self-host is a good thing to advocate, I think the complexity and difficulty involved not just to do it, but to do it right is going to be a straight cliff of a learning curve for those not already technically inclined in databases, networking, and filesystems/block storage.
Honestly, taking the burden of being IT for a reasonable subscription cost for your efforts is a better way to go, especially if the setup allows for expanding your offerings to other members in a localized community.
Which is why i’m planning around my setup for two years already (some of the fancy nice-to-haves are stale again already) and am going the route of minimal yet pragmatic toolset because i did learn that stuff but didn’t do the graduation (am dev now) and the bigger tools are more rigide in how to do it and break more often.
And yeah, sharing my selfhost was low on the list already.