If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

Or maybe @WhiteHotaru@feddit.org would like to do that for us?

Thanks. Yeah those would be great in an awesome-webhosting list. Or something concerned with household or businesses. But as far as I know you’re supposed to stick with a topic with those awesome lists and not make random lists of random projects… I’ve filed a bug report in the meantime: https://github.com/ccbikai/awesome-homelab/issues/24

Lol. Why isn’t Forgejo in Development but some predecessors are? And Gitea is listed twice. And why is a tower defense game listed under Automation? Also I think a few projects I use are missing. Why isn’t the most common content management system there? The second most common password manager? The reverse proxy everyone uses? And who on earth needs customer live chat and a lot of business-scale website analytics, webshop systems and CRM and ERP in their homelab?? I’m sorry but this looks like slop.

One thing I did is connect to the smart home (Home Assistant) and the NAS running at home. Some internet service providers don’t provide proper IPv4 addresses any more so IPv6 is the most convenient way to connect. This doesn’t require a VPN provider, though.

As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.

There’s Freifunk as well!

Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.

I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great as well.

Unfortunately JMAP isn’t supported (yet) by a lot of email clients. I don’t think there’s a good open-source email suite for computers available… But I’ve tried Stalwart as well and it’s really sleek and seems to come with good defaults.

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

Yeah, looks like a coordinated effort. They’re re-aligning other things as well. They also forfeited their pledge not to develop AI for weapons and surveillance. Joined that “age restriction” effort to collect people’s IDs. And I’ve seen a massive crackdown on Youtube, from ramping up advertisements, making it harder to circumvent these, or download videos, to what they pay to creators which has also reportedly changed substantially.

I guess Android is amongst the more annoying ones, because we all rely on smartphones and the operating system on there.

Great. I’m still disgruntled by them restricting device-trees, AOSP development and app installation in the future.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

I’m a bit below 20W. But I custom-built the computer a long time ago with an energy-efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU. I think other options for people who don’t need a lot of harddisks or a graphics card include old laptops or Mini-PCs. Those should idle at somewhat like 10-15W. It stretches the definition of “desktop pc” a bit, but I guess you could place them on a desk as well 😉

There’s another community for this: !localllama@sh.itjust.works
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that’s how most people do it. It’s going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware… The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you’ll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can’t migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

Probably the safe bet. Though I think my 8th gen Intel does AV1 decode as well. But it’s not hardware accelerated, so quite some cpu load and full hd is the limit, it can’t do 4k or anything fancy. And definitely no realtime av1 encoding.