Unfortunately not as self hosting is really just an amalgamation of a number of different technologies, concepts, groups of best practices, and there are nine and a half viable ways to do any given thing you’ll want to do. For my day job I manage several public systems that serve millions of requests a day and even I can’t really give you a “One definitive way of doing things”, but I have my preferences.

I think if you wanted a rough plan of what would be the most valuable things to learn in which order it would be

1. Docker, especially persisting your storage and also how its network works. Use containerized services only on your local network at first to get a feel for things, and give yourself the ability to screw things ip without putting yourself in any danger.

2. VPNs and how they work. You can start with a direct stupid simple VPN like WireGuard, or Tailscale if you want a mesh-VPN. This will allow you to reach your services remotely without having to worry too much about security and the micromanagement that can sometimes come with it.

3. Reverse proxies for things you’d like to expose to the public. At this point you want to learn as well about things like server hardening, have a system in place to automate software updates etc. there’s a common misconception that using a reverse proxy is innately much safer than port forwarding directly to your services. It can help by obscuring your home IP, and if you pair it with a WAF of some kind that’ll help you with much of the chaff attacks that get tossed your way, but at the end of the day in both cases you’re exposing the web services on your local network to the internet at large, so you have to understand the risk and reward of doing this.

I say this as someone who likes fediverse microblogging (Mastodon, MissKey, etc) it will never be Mastodon. Mastodon and its maintainers are staunchly against all the things that would make it a viable replacement to Twitter.

Why wouldn’t they?

Well almost nothing in this world is priced based solely on the cost of materials so I wouldn’t waste your time thinking in terms like that. And it is in fact the case that a $500 router is demonstrably better than a $100 router. A $300 UniFi router is pretty much the ground floor of decent router performance, and even then you’re severely lacking in warranty and support, and the software is subpar.

Beyond a certain point things that are more expensive are just more expensive because they are, not because they represent better quality.

This is true, but the “certain point” in this case is not $100. $500 is much closer to being that point, and even then that’s only if you’re thinking in the scope of a consumer router. Business class routers are thousands of dollars.

Why would it be wild to you that someone would use a technology the way it’s intended?

$500 is not an unreasonable price for a router if it’s actually good and comes with a good warranty.

Is he not the very same president who tried to ban it before?

deleted by creator

Believing that either the Reddit exodus was negligible to that community, or that it was entirely decimated and left to Lenny are both inaccurate opinions. There was a very tangible effect on the selfhosted subreddit specifically when many left for Lemmy, and now both communities both feel like two halves of the same whole. Enough people moved over to lemmy that I truly don’t feel the need to open reddit hardly ever, but I do from time to time. I think lemmy also has a benefit that other fediverse sites like Mastodon don’t, in that Lemmy is not quite as allergic to the concept of discoverability, and the fact that Lemmy is inherently based around communities means that you don’t have to do the Mastodon thing where you spend the first month having to go out and follow a ton of individuals. You can just follow a couple communities and the content flows in.

I switched from SWAG to Caddy. Its config file is much simpler, with many best practice settings being default resulting in each sites being like 3 lines of code. Implementing something like mTLS requires one line per site, just super nice to configure, and you’re not left without a template config for more obscure services.

That being said, SWAG does more than enough and Nginx is a powerful software so you really aren’t missing out on anything but more streamlined config.

Traefik is kind of just like, a nightmare that tries to sell you on it being “self configuring” but it takes some work to get to that point and the “self configuring” requires the same amount of time in a text editor as manually configuring Caddy does. I can see Traefik being powerful if you’re using it with actually clustered k8s and distributed workloads. If that’s not your use case it’s kinda just more work than it’s worth.

StaRSS

For you trekkies out there

As somebody who runs Ubiquity UniFi gear, it’s all flash and very little substance. Its dashboard will dazzle you with charts that either aren’t accurate, aren’t meaningful, or are generally unhelpful. It has a “new” (half a decade old now) and classic interface you can choose between, but neither interface gives you access to every setting you’ll need. I still to this day find myself swapping between them.

If you just need basic devices to make packets go, they do the job. But an average day in the life of a UniFi-enjoyer consists of things like trying to troubleshoot some kind of network issue only to find that the data collected by the devices doesn’t mathematically make sense, so you go to the UniFi forums just to find out it’s a bug that’s existed for years and has never been resolved. And on days like that, I find myself wishing I had something less flashy that would just allow me to see what’s going on with my network, accurately.

Normies

I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.

But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.

When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.

I should clarify that what I’m asking is what you think the benefit would be. Since you don’t have an answer to the question I will give it to you: There would be no benefit. There already exists dozens of gTLDs to migrate to, they don’t need another specific one.

I don’t think they really need a standardized place to move to. The natural gTLD for them to move to today would be .tech, but it could be anything. Nothing wrong with good old .com. Every one of these companies undoubtedly already own at least a dozen versions of their domains on all the most popular gTLDs. The time scale of moving would also be 5-10 years. Thats plenty of time to move your domain, have a redirect on the old domain, and people to get used to the new domain.

…why? For what purpose and how would that help at all?

The coexistence of .gb and .uk is only because .uk predates the rule by a few months. You could say it was grandfathered in, though they are both reserved in ISO 3166-1. This one isn’t a good example of something that can happen decades after the rule was put in place.

As for .eu it isn’t really an exception, .eu is reserved in ISO 3166-1.

How would IANA changing one TLD into a different TLD and then everyone using the old TLD migrating everything to the new TLD be any easier than everyone just migrating everything to a new TLD?

In either case there wouldn’t be anything “in unison” about it.

Yes I have. ccTLDs are 2 characters, as I specified above. To make .io into a gTLD you’d need to add a third character, which wouldn’t do anything to help the companies who are using .io today.

The companies who are using .io who aren’t associated with the Indian Ocean Territories will however have 5 years (or 10 if an extension is requested) to migrate to a gTLD before .io is retired.