Comment by menssen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by menssen | Hacker News Reader

Nothing. I self-host nothing. My entire home networking infrastructure consists of a more powerful WiFi router than the one built into the modem that the cable company provides so that it reaches to the back of my apartment. I pay money for GitHub, Dropbox, iCloud, Apple Music, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, a VPN to spoof my location occasionally, and Google Apps (or I would, if I were not grandfathered into the free tier). When I want to spin up a personal project, I do it on Heroku.

I live in a stable first-world democracy. Or, since it seems to be getting less stable recently, maybe a better way to put it is: I participate in a stable global economy. If "the cloud" catastrophically fails to the point where I lose all of the above without warning, I will likely have bigger problems than never being able to watch a favorite tv show again.

I wonder if this exposes two kinds of people: those who value mobility, and are more comfortable limiting the things that are important to them to a laptop and a bug-out bag, and those who value stability, and are inclined to build self-sufficient infrastructure in their castles.

There's a third kind of person - one who doesn't want their personal data beholden to a bunch of faceless for-profit companies who have proven they care less about security and privacy than they do about money.

I don't self host a lot of services (and the ones that do could go away tomorrow without hurting me much) but I only have one cloud resource - email. It kind of has to be that way for various reasons; I'd self host if I could reasonably do so. I also think I value my $75/mo more than I value an endless stream of entertainment.

(edit: just wanted to say, thanks for posting this. It is a valuable discussion point.)

Not to mention a fourth kind of person - one who just wants services that work better than what the cloud offers.

By definition, self-hosting means the service is under my control, doing what I need, customized for my use cases. And because I use only open source stacks, I can (and have) even modify the code to customize even further.

And that's ignoring the fact that free, self-hosted options can often provide features that third party services cannot for legal, technical, or supports reasons.

For example, my TT-RSS feed setup uses a scraper to pull full article content right into the feed. A service would probably land in legal trouble if they did this. And while it works incredibly well, like, 90% of the time (thank you Henry Wang, author of mercury-parser-api!), if it was a service, that 10% could result in thousands of support emails or an exodus of subscribers.

Could you elaborate on how you got TTRSS to scrape?

I installed the Mercury parser plugin:

https://github.com/HenryQW/mercury_fulltext

The directions there are pretty clear. You've gotta set up the mercury parser API service (I used docker) and then enable the plugin for the feeds you want to apply it to.

Alternatively you could use the Readability plugin that ships with tt-rss, but I have no idea how effective it is as I never tried it.

Finally, you could stand up the RSS full text proxy:

https://github.com/Kombustor/rss-fulltext-proxy

That service standa between your RSS feed reader of choice and the RSS feed supplier and does the scraping and embedding.

yup, i keep my data at home for that reason. except email. but i don't host any services, just plain ssh access, and recently i started using syncthing to share some files among my devices.

I host my own stuff for fun and excersise

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