I thought about this multiple times, I’ve went digital minimalist and it partially is better, you just unlock so much space and mind relax once you are a few days without an internet connection. But I think that’s not enough. And the internet today is shit, like every communication media, if it isn’t permeated by enough novelty it starts being in control of the few and it starts entering game powers and becoming shit. Think of printed press, radio, TV: all great inventions but they all eventually just lost their original empowering and sharing purpose and became redundant stuff, getting worse and worse, more and more controlled, less and less free and reachable.

And this is happening to the internet as well, it’s not a novelty, it’s just that we’ve grown up with it, and as the tool is new its way of getting out of reach is new as well, and there aren’t worthy alternatives yet, at least not so used that you can even build very effective communities / new medias of communication on. It’s not even internet fault, it’s human fault. We love power games and control so much that we end up using our tools to destroy ourselves instead of empowering ourselves, that’s not a technological problem, that’s a cultural one. We are stressed animals, we’ve been like that for centuries.

I am also very very very, and I mean very tired. Every business wants to enter social medias, and every person who joins social medias ends up becoming the same: they want more, more followers, more attention, more posts. People are starting to lose actual human contact and interactions, even sex is starting to be more about a screen than body on body.

We have AMAZING tools. Internet is amazing, AI is amazing. We could solve so much of the world’s problems if we used them the right way, but we didn’t. We like becoming stale, we like to avoid novelty, to avoid connection, we are sick and stressed. We simply focus on the wrong things. All the time.

I mean think how software just progresses better if it’s open source, think about Linux, it’s just an open, novelty seeking OS. Even Linux Torvalds said that every kind of locking development with licenses, every kind, even GNU licenses that made illegal to close source the code, was detrimental to the development, he was an advisor of completely open licenses as MIT. And that’s because he loved what he was doing, and loved that the code was completely accessible and most companies originally were selling support, not their code.

Proprietary platforms mask the same ways to profit on you as novelty accessibility. They lock down their code and they make it stale, the problem is not even they wanna profit from it, it’s they wanna subtly profit on you without you being completely aware on what they are doing (whether we can still debate if money is a good way to exchange value between people). It’s they wanna play tricks on you. It’s okay if you sell a platform to someone for a service in exchange, it’s not okay to strongly push people on it, locking their machines down, closing down hardware and software on a single platform, influencing the politics, people’s view of reality, actively destroying alternatives, for selling your product.

They all knew what they were doing, but they saw the profits and started to ignore everything else.

Power makes people sick, power is our problem, the concept of power is something typical of a carnivorous animal when it predates other animals, or in hierarchical structures all deriving from the stress of the animal about not being able to satisfy its needs. And being so aggressive towards our own species to the point of creating institutions made specifically for that purpose is something that can arise just from a highly stressed species. We ignored the existing networks in nature and ignored that real harmony can be found in relationships that are more similar to symbiosis, not to predation. We are definitely capable of satisfying our basic needs as a collective species thanks to all our technologies, but we did never seek for balance, we seek for power. Instead of accepting death and pain we started to reject them, and in that process we created way worse pain and more death, and we became blind to beauty. Sometimes somehow we seem to realize it and create better situations, but history teaches that we always come back, it’s a cycle.

I don’t even think this can be solved by human beings unless we somehow change our brains, the alternative is some sort of external entity interacting with us, something that can be incredibly fast and distributed. Otherwise, with the help of our beloved technology, we’ve happily became so powerful that we can destroy ourselves.

lovely

In my experience matrix is a total mess with plenty of bugs, also uses quite a lot server resources. xmpp is lighter, easier to set up and works flawlessly, and seem also easier to proxy or do stuff like that with it. Calls are kinda messy to set up tho.

It’s simply another case where we have amazing technologies but we lack the right ways to use them, that’s what our culture does: creating amazing techs that can solve lots of human problems and then discarding the part that actually solves a problem unless it’s also profitable for the individual.

It literally is a problem of people wanting to submit other people for power games, that’s not how all societies work, but that’s a foundation for ours, but we’re playing this game so much that we almost broke the console (planet earth and our own bodies health).

It’s an anthropological problem, not a technological one.

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

Slowly switch to Linux devices, or dumb phone, and learning to adapt happily living without some features, but also without control and censorship :)

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Self hosting IS hard, don’t beat yourself too much because of it… After all you’re trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it’s okay to feel frustrated sometimes.

How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?

I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it’s still pretty buggy…

Enough focus to read documentation.

That’s really it. If your purpose is just self hosting learning bash could also be helpful. And yeah Linux would be a great choice.

But mostly, if you want to self host an instance of Nextcloud correctly and without having to deal with too many unexpected things, you have to read the documentation and do not rush. Most self hosted stuff isn’t “install and use”, because you’ll be your own server manager, and everything requires attention to be managed.

Docker or not docker you will have to deal with configuration, settings, requirements and updates.

So understanding how to read the docs/search and open github issues and taking time to read everything would be the most important skill for me.

Also writing down what you are doing would indeed be helpful too, in order not to lose track of what you’re doing on your server. (Check out Ansible).

Most apps out there simply need you to know about permissions, systemctl services and package managers.

Try to always find a specific package for your distro for everything you install (eg. .deb for Debian), and have strategies when this is not possible (aka using a Python venv when installing python programs).

That looks way more than a home server, it looks like something i would expect to see for a small business!