ArborNode

Continuwuity is so easy the setup and maintain. If you want to self host a matrix server, I couldn’t recommend this enough.

I think the clients are all better lately. For Android I prefer Schildi Chat Next. For most everything else we use my self hosted Cinny web app. My only iPhone user likes elementX. Fluffy Chat is solid for messaging only, but I did not like that it can’t do the voice and video calls. They may have added that by now, I’m not an expert.

I run a self hosted server for my household and my family gets a lot out of it. I’m not quite sure I’d consider it a gift as much as I do a way to save money and have more privacy and control. To be more blunt, I do not expect my wife would feel happy with me telling her it is a “gift” for her as it is clearly a hobby of mine.

For your question on OS, truenas scale has worked really well for me. If you have comfort running Debian server, that’s a great way to go as well. I think truenas scale would fit you well for one of your specific notes, “Having a simple container interface for future features like homeassistant and jellyfin et al is great too.” I love how easy my containers are to work on and maintain in truenas.

Ultimately, I think you should spin up every OS you are considering and look around first. It would only take a few hours of your time and it’s a very personal choice to a certain degree.

Great post! I can definitely feel you on the SMTP settup for it being your first time.

Really cool to read the perspective of someone so new to this that’s informative instead of being for help.

Welcome to the club!

I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn’t ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).

Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don’t have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn’t eat up too much bandwidth.

I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don’t think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it’s not a panacea. Not saying I’ll never try it though.

To some degree yes. I ran an experiment to see and found there is just too much of the existing internet infrastructure not implementing IPV6 for this to be reliable. For instance, you can’t use it for email intake because only 2 major players do IPV6.

You still get dynamic assignments from the ISP and have to automate keeping your AAAA records up to date.

The short answer is, it depends. For what OP is doing here, I expect it would work.

If anyone else has messed with this, I’d love to here about it. Might be good as it’s own post.

For those of us behind double NAT (CGNAT) forwarding ports is not an option as we do not control forwarding on the second gateway. This will limit you to any of the solutions that include a device outside your network with a public port that tunnels traffic into your server.

Are you strictly self hosting with this device? If so there are whole operating systems that make this easy. TrueNAS Scale for example.

I would suggest broadening your search. Debian vs Ubuntu is not much of a difference in my opinion. Videos and just trying some can help you decide.