The fourth article in my series about “self-hosting for newbies” explaining how I take care of backups for my YunoHost server.
The fourth article in my series about “self-hosting for newbies” explaining how I take care of backups for my YunoHost server.
You didn’t need either of those things. This reads like an ad for yunohost.
You’re right in that you don’t NEED them but it sure makes things a lot easier.
Not even using yunohost… just Debian and docker.
You are right, you don’t need yunohost, but it makes selfhosting pretty easy.
send from my piefed instance hosted by yunohost ^^
No, it’s legit. Elena has been tooting and peertubing about the fedi and her self hosting journey for over a year.
It still reads like an ad for yunohost…
I think one of the mistakes many newb self hosters make is thinking of systems in their entirety rather than as components.
“How to install pihole on a raspberry pi” and “how to setup nextcloud on yunohost” are examples. All using very specific tools and very specific steps.
I’m noticing this more and more with documentation for apps where they tell me to use their specific docker-compose file and have instructions to use let’s encrypt in a specific way rather than referring you to let’s encrypt as an option and pointing you at their docs.
People aren’t learning how to use each of these tools and how to be flexible in their implementation.
I think you could take this arbitrarily far. Why buy a motherboard when building a computer when you should design the PCB yourself? Why go with a pre-existing processor? You should design the architecture from scratch. Why aren’t you mining your own silicon and growing your own ingots? You’re not a real nerd unless you have your own chip fab.
Some people get into self hosting because they want their data to be their data. They don’t care about the particulars, they just want that peace of mind. Others get into it because they’re already in a tech or tech-adjacent field and want to improve their skills. Some, such as myself, fall somewhere in the middle. I work in IT and am sometimes in the mood to tinker, but sometimes I just want it to work without much fuss.
These people are the worst. What they want is fine - but the idea that you don’t need to worry about the particulars is ridiculous.
This can be said about literally anything. And it’s a “slippery slope fallacy” to use as an argument.
There are “appropriate levels of understanding” I’m advocating for. I’m not even saying “don’t use yunohost” - just understand what the components you’re using do and how they interoperate.
Depends highly on the people. I learned that way, to get started with recipes enabled me to get early successes which in turn motivated me.
Down the road I needed different things from my setup, which could not be found in a simple recipe anymore, so I needed to learn the parts of the machine.
Exactly. Both newbies and experienced admins aren’t always looking for a general summary on how to build something. Sometimes we need a direct, easy guide to build the tool we’ve already decided to implement. Let them read the documentation so I don’t have to.
Exactly why the article promotes stupidity. Why in the world would you put those words down proudly?
How can something be an ad when there is nothing to sell?
“Reads like an ad” - see also “simile”.
In germany when we say, sounds like, looks like or reads like, we mean it is. Sorry when i misunderstood.
That’s fair - I’ll keep that in mind in the future to be more clear.
An ad for what, exactly? Yunohost doesn’t have anything to sell you…
Sometimes people are just passionate about things. Like digital sovereignty.
Who gives a shit? I don’t know how to write apps for my phone either, I just click the install button and away I go. I don’t have time for a new career. If it weren’t for YNH I wouldn’t be hosting at all. And it’s not for lack of trying. Shit is complicated.
🙄
I’m always a little surprised when people are passionate about being ignorant.
I am too, which is why your comments are so surprising.
Yeah - I’m the one wallowing in ignorance.
Yes, you’re the one ignorant of the fact that people want (and should have) digital sovereignty without needing a software engineering degree.
Er… I’m not - I’m deriding that fact. Do you know what “ignorant” means?
I have used (and loved) Yunohost for a long time, and I host it at home. A few years back, I did set up a vps to proxy the traffic (over wireguard) so that I could actually get a letsencrypt cert. Some apps really don’t like self-signed certs.
It sure makes things easy to host!
You do not need a VPS, proxy, or wireguard for letsencrypt.
Right? This is the whole “lack of understanding” that I’m going on about. “But the install instructions for some other application said to do this.” So it becomes cargo-cult system administration.
It’s how we end up with
curl https://some.rando.url/install.sh | sudo bash -cas an acceptable way of installing software. Don’t understand it, don’t question it, don’t look at what that shell script you’re running as root does, just copy / paste / and go! I don’t want to care about the details!And you see it in the comments in this forum where anytime anyone asks a question there are dozens of replies like “just use yunohost” or “just rebuild your entire server with unraid” without addressing the one component that needs addressing or offering multiple solutions. It’s just “my click and forget solution worked for me so it’s the way everyone should do it.”
This is how we end up with walled gardens - to protect these people from themselves. Self-hosting should involve some amount of learning about what you’re doing because “there be dragons” out there.
I have nothing against yunohost or letsencrypt (the latter is simply amazing) - but one should understand that these things are components that are part of a larger system.
</rant>
How do you know that people do not read the scripts first and come to the conclusion “that is safe, nice that somebody build a convenience script I just need to read”?
Same as above. I read those comments as helpful “hey, that worked for me, maybe it does for you, YMMV” instead of “everybody should do it”.
🤣
I don’t remember exactly why, but I couldn’t get it to work any other way. First problem was incoming port 80 blocked by my ISP.