mereo

Self-hosting is a community effort in which the whole community helps each other to self-host their data, including programming the services people use for this purpose. The problem with closed-source software is that we don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, or if it’s indeed sending telemetry.

Even worse, if that service is ever no longer supported or updated, I’ll be left with data on my server that can’t be used to its full potential, and a service that won’t receive security updates.

Open-source software, on the other hand, is a community effort. If, for example, software is no longer updated or supported, it can easily be forked, and my data can be transferred to the new service.

*Sigh*… As always, life must be balanced. You can’t go from one extreme to the other. It’s a spectrum. I self-host what I deem important in order to keep it under my control and not on a capitalist platform.

It’s an adventure, each month, you learn more and realize that you can host more services yourself.

I self-host because I want to be in control of my data and own it. Closed software is the antithesis of that. They’re just bots trying to advertise their software.

I had long covid for 3 years after that. But I’m feeling better nowadays, thanks.

Temporary becomes permanent. When I was experiencing severe long-term symptoms of Covid, I bought a refurbished computer to use as a NAS with Jellyfin, Sonarr, and indexers. I kept the installed Windows 10 because I simply did not have the energy to do more. Then, when I felt better, I told myself, “Let me add more services.”

Now, it’s a Frankenstein computer where Windows 10 acts as the hypervisor, running Caddy as my reverse proxy. Crowdsec protects my services, and my Flint 2’s firewall acts as the Crowdsec bouncer. A VirtualBox VM runs in Windows 10 and hosts most of my Docker containers. Stablebits DrivePool manages my drive pool.

I’ve been running this setup for over a year, and I haven’t had any issues. I know I should switch to Linux, but since it’s been working great and I’m busy, I’ve been procrastinating.

It seems watches like Garmin Watches are not affected by this:

Two things that aren’t changing: every Strava athlete can still access and download their data for free, at any time – and wearable and device integrations are not affected .

There could be multiple factors. For example, I have a Nextcloud instance that is fully managed by Hetzner, and I didn't bother to find out what database it uses...