You don’t even have to be old. Death or serious illness/injury can affect us at any age, and it would suck if your family lost access to all the self-hosted photos and videos, for example.

“Make it usable” is a great idea.

Simplify as much as you can.

And remember, if you’re also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you’re gone.

I’ve been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.

Bookmarking “headscale”!

I only recently started using Tailscale because it makes connecting to my local network through a Windows VM running in Boxes on Linux a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to set up a networked bridge.

This sounds like a great alternative, and it looks like it can even work on a Synology NAS.

Yes!! That would be really helpful, too.

According to the dev, Play Services is only needed for casting:

“…you only need play services for Chromecast.” SOURCE, replying to a GrapheneOS user

He even offers an option to install without the play store (via Aurora) and to contact him for the license. SOURCE

The only feature I want (because it really does feel all my other needs perfectly) is the ability to DELETE articles.

Some of the stuff that gets by RSS before it’s moderated out from the source, can be awful. Since I keep an archive of my feeds, this becomes problematic.

Symfonium

What didn’t you like about it?

That’s what I’m using after looking at a bunch of other options based on my requirements, and while I didn’t want to go with a closed source, paid app, it does everything.

Poison your Facebook account and anything you post. Let their AI be trained on garbage so it becomes a liability.

Before you do that, let the people, orgs, and companies who insist on using those platforms know that they will no longer be able to reach you.

It’s not enough for users to abandon those sites, big players need to, too.

JuryNow doesn’t store any personal data or persistent user identifiers. The questions and votes are not linked to individuals in a way that would allow tracking behavior over time.

Great to hear!

There is a User Agreement, Liability, Disclaimer etc…

Are these currently in place? I don’t see links to them on the homepage, or during the sign-up screen.

I like the idea, but it needs a privacy policy. If someone answered 100 of those questions, the insight into their behaviour would be incredibly valuable to bad actors.

Guaranteeing anonymity would make this much better.

Is it easy to set up SSL on a PiHole? I wanted to get Adguard home setup (similar to Pihole) but the complexity of setting up secure connections and I’m like, “yeah, nobody in my family is going to be able to fix this if something happens when I’m not around”. 😂

For context, I have a single Synology NAS, so recovering and testing the entire backup set would not be practical in my case.

I have been able to test single files or entire folders and they work fine, but obviously I’d have no way of testing the entire backup set due to the above consideration. It is my understanding that the verify feature that Synology uses is to ensure that there’s no bit rot and that the file integrity is intact. My hope is that because of how many isolated backups I do keep, the chance of not being able to recover is slim to none.

How does one realistically test their backups, if they are doing the 3-2-1 backup plan?

I validate (or whatever the term used is) my backups, once a month, and trust that it means something 😰

Fiy, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the highest rates charities on Charity Navigator.

They don’t always make the best choices as far as product direction, but as a charity, they are quite respectable.

Immich, I believe, is linked to Futo. And Futo has a license model that’s basically “if you like this app, and want to support the development, consider buying a license.”

Sounds like it might be similar with Immich.

Better than “donate to this project”, since a license seems more like the user is getting something out of it, even if it’s basically a glorified donation 😂

Just for clarity, I followed the links they wanted me to follow.

The sketchy tone and vagueness while they “do stuff” after getting your email seem to have no connection to self-hosting at all.

If my intention was not to self-host, they lost me before I could even trust them enough to provide an email address 😟

Register

Provide your email address and agree to let us do stuff, and we’ll send you a verification email to create your account and get started.

Guys, if we’re already paranoid enough to be interested in a product like this, don’t make us paranoid to even want to “get started” using a product like this.

Sounds like a scam, even if they are totally legit.

Is that a good or bad? Could go both ways 🤭

Yes, but is this them being assholes, or them wanting to make sure that users aren’t making their system unreliable? I think there would be a huge distinction there.

For example, say a user wanted to create a cache drive using an SSD. But because the user doesn’t know better, they buy the cheapest crap they can find, install it, and set up caching. But because they’re using cheap shit, the drive is slow and the user reports poor performance, system hangups, and other instability.

Wouldn’t it be in Synology’s best interest to say “here’s a list of drives we know will give you the best experience.”?

Now, Synology has already done that, but users are ignoring it and continue to use poor storage drives expecting to use pretty sophisticated features. What now? Well, Synology disables those features.

For example:

De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives

Um, yeah. That makes sense. If a shitty hard drive can’t reliably get firmware updates through the NAS, why on earth would they want to keep that option enabled? Same with lifespan analysis. If a crappy drive isn’t using modern standards and protocols for measuring and logging errors and performance data, Synology really can’t “enable” this to work, can they?

That’s what I think is happening. Although, this could be just greed, too. I don’t think there’s any real problem for most users, unless they say that we can’t use fairly common, high-quality NAS drives from Seagate or WD and must use their own branded drives. I’d have a huge problem with that.