Comment by renegat0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renegat0x0 | Hacker News Reader

I think the only way to break the cycle is to selfhost.

Google will not scan your mails, will not scan your drive. Microsoft will not scan you drive. Apple will not process your pictures. Twitter will not control your speech. NSA will not see if you were at a protest, or went to a medical facility to perform a surgery of any kind.

"But does it matter if NSA sees me at a protest?" asks somebody. We will see. We will see. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe never. Let's hope so.

Most of things you can self host. Probably the biggest problem is to selfhost videos, as they are heavy.

"But it is difficult to self host, and dangerous" says somebody. Yes it is. Yes it is.

"But I will not be able to talk with my friends" complains somebody. Let's wait how it all pans out. Maybe corporations and governments will not see and control everything we do. Maybe they will.

They have all the money they want. They can make all the money they want.

They have a machine, they can make all the money. It's not about money.

It's about control, it's about their vision of how they wanna see the world.

100%

What if you could self host on all your devices and they were all seamlessly connected to each other like a single distributed OS without any kind of server in the middle? Then when your data is abused you have nobody to blame but yourself and all your data is always available so long as your devices are connected. No ads, no weaponized personal data, no spam, no extra expenses. Its just your hardware, your internet connection, and just the right software solution.

The problem there becomes bandwidth. Its better, but upload speeds are still not great and sometimes I think that its intentionally done to help funnel people to using monitizable web services instead of just self hosting everything.

In asymmetric networks this is true, however as asymmetric bandwidth is an old trend that is dying out. That is good. On high bandwidth networks, 300mbps+, everything is symmetric. For example my home network connection is about 860-920nbps up and down where the upload is generally quite a bit faster than the download.

The reason why networks used to be symmetric is because ISPs believed users downloaded far more frequently than they uploaded and therefore a greater percentage of the pipe was dedicated to download channels. That increases QOS on bandwidth constrained pipes but comes at a traffic management cost. Now IPS figure if the network is already fast and the user wants it to be even faster then they can just pay for a larger pipe and everybody's happy.

Why can’t a non-profit with a community board run these types of services? Like Wikipedia.

They can. People just have to give up higher pay to work on that instead.

But I think this basically exists and is called indieweb?

This is the order of preference to store my personal data (i.e email, files, etc.):

1. Self-hosted by me

2. Stored by a for-profit company I am paying

3. Stored by a megacorp

4. Stored by a non-profit

--

2 and 3 have an economic incentive not to lose my data, and have money to pay for decent engineers. 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager

I'd agree on that about e-mail but honestly wouldn't care for chat, as long as I can keep logs locally.

> 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager

... isn't 1 the same then ? Aside from teenager part

See my comment, but I have some terrible trenched stories with how non profit run service.

A last one : I was ask to pry open the personal windows of a freshly dead employee because apparently a bunch of critical informations were stored on it ( payroll, bunch of passwords to Linux boxes running stuff )

I refused, then asked to get permission of family.

Then I learned that the plan was to basically reclaim that personal laptop of a dead employee because migrating stuff was too hard.

I told them I was busy.

I think they stole that laptop containing private correspondance and still use it today.

It’s a NGO you heard off. Running on most continents.

My take : IT and security are a distant thought in those places and you need strong top down directions and training to enforce basic hygiene

1 and 4 have an incentive not to keep your data, munch it into AI/ML, sell it to advertisers, governments, anyone who asks.

2 and 3 have absolutely no incentive not to lose your data. When was the last time any company got seriously hurt by a data breach? Hell, even password managers lose data and keep chugging on.

The teenager is now 38 and has moved states 3 time. But still has the full set of credentials on his personal laptop.

Oh wait. He don’t anymore .

since he switched laptop and don’t care anymore, but weirdly nobody made backup because their is a sense that this once teenager ought to keep things running, somehow.

( inspired by real life even. )

Wikipedia is still a centralized service. It is better than some others, but I can see countless examples of spooks editing the pages of important people or issues to tell the desired narrative. Many of us do not bother viewing or citing Wikipedia on some topics.

>Google will not scan your mails

Except the ones you send to people using Google...

so you punish your lazy "friends" like, i dunno, your real estate agent by refusing to read emails from them because they sold their souls to Gmail. This is so absurd.

Arguably then it is no longer your emails.

How can people honestly self-host though? Mail for example, is hard to self-host, I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain? Where we all just run a light weight piece of kit like a rasberry pi and host a hub which runs a mesh network and messages are passed over that automatically encrypted with your private key which can also be retrieved over the network.

It seems possible to create separate tiny devices for different applications and sell them prepackaged. The installation process would look like plugging it into electrical outlet and connecting to your local Wi-Fi. Redundancy can be achieved using close friends and family devices of the same class.

I am running a set of SBCs, but I read that it is better to use one server [1]. I suppose one could go with a VM, or portainer, or Yacht, or some other software to visualize everything.

Right now I am using a set or solutions:

* email * [2]

* files * using NextCloud

* blog * using Hugo

* news * using my own RSS reader

* pihole * to filter things

What I consider to use in the future

* pictures * using photoprism

* citadel * I found some sort of suites like citadel. Not sure if that works, if it is good, or if it fits my needs at all [3]. At the first glance seems like a fun project.

Links:

[1] https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/

[2] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/emailwiz

[3] https://www.citadel.org/

All in all it is time consuming to setup up, and update regularly.

For me it was mostly one time setup cost and once-every-2-years Debian upgrade.

unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)

mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.

If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.

I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps

> How can people honestly self-host though?

They can't or won't.

...and the ones that do are an insignificant drop in the bucket in terms of numbers. Unless "self-hosting" one's digital infrastructure can become easy and off-the-shelf for non-tech folks (or even tech folks that value their time and effort), it just not going to happen.

Mail isn't hard. There are several one click mail set ups for docker or a VPS. I ran Mail in a Box for years and never even had to look at it because it was all self updating, unlike my webserver, which I had to remeber to go update occasionally.

Can you recommend a specific one?

> I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain

I think you might have meant distributed and decentralized systems in general. But the answer has nothing to do with technology. We have all the decentralized technology we need (long before blockchain by the way), even e-mail is somewhat decentralized (well, at least distributed), yet it doesn't solve the problem by itself.

Mail is not hard to self-host. There is a one-time setup toil you need to just sit down and get past, but then… it just sits there working. I’ve self-hosted Email for over a decade, on a $5/mo Linux VPS running Debian, exim, and dovecot. Multiple domains, multiple users, SSL, SPF, DKIM, the works. Since Email doesn’t cost anything in terms of computing load, I do light duty web hosting from the same box. $5 a month to not have to rely on the graces of megacorps to function on the internet.

Even if you’re scared of Linux and writing exim.conf, there are more or less turnkey docker containers out there and whatnot too. I can’t recommend one because I think docker is pointless for a single host running a few applications.

it's pointless to self-host mail (except for backups maybe) because 99% of your normal-life recipients are likely to be on Google and the content of your emails will be ingested by the big brother anyway.

My reason for self hosting is not to keep my data away from BigTech. That’s a fight nobody can win anymore.

The reason I do it is that E-mail is often the only identity on other services I use (it’s often the only way to reset your passwords), and I feel it is too risky to be dependent on a megacorp for my identity, a megacorp who may decide out of the blue to suspend my account for no reason.

I’m dependent on my VPS provider, but I have backups and can take my Debian config with me to a different one. Or bare metal if I have to.

I’m dependent on my DNS registrar and haven’t figured out a good way to mitigate that risk.

Besides that, that’s it.

I agree about identity, but this can also be accomplished by "owning" your domain and using a mail provider that allow you to use it. Even Apple does nowadays.

Has domain management gotten easier over the years? I had always hard how much of a game it w trying to keep up with making sure a self-hosted email server isn't blocked or flagged as spam.

That plus the fact that the receiver on almost all my emails would be storing them on one of the few big providers and it just never felt worth it.

I basically don’t even have to lift a finger. Once set up, everything just hums along. Security updates only.

I have very, very rare deliverability problems, maybe once every two years AT&T decides to block mails from my domain but I resolve it through their easy process.

I have the advantage of having done this for 15 or so years so my IP has some good reputation, but I don’t think IP reputation is really that huge or necessary. The first rule of self hosting Email is “never spam—not even once.” Follow that and you’re in good shape.

Great to hear, thanks for sharing! I self host a Nextcloud server for the basics, sounds like it's time for me to revisit email self hosting as well

Until Google and Microsoft decide they don't like your IP, or you missed a step in setting up the things you mentioned like SPF or DKIM. It is easy to stand up a mail server, but deliverability is still a challenge.

Neither Google or Microsoft use long term IP reputation. They may temporarily block an IP for various reasons (it will even reflect that in the SMTP error message), but never in the long term. All major email service providers work with domain reputation, not IP reputation.

However, you do need proof that you 'own' the IP address by means of a reverse IP address. ISPs generally don't allow their customers to set a reverse-DNS record for the IP address, because you do not own the IP. Since most spam originates from botnets from consumer IP addresses, adding the reverse-DNS requirement resulted in a huge reduction in spam.

The email service providers didn't ruin email, spammers did.

I do selfhost as well, but unless your partner or child is also a nerd, digital legacy can become a problem.

Self hosting is not sufficient. We saw that with the kiwi farms website. I didn't follow their story too close but it's wild how not just Cloudflare dropped them but also how big ISPs were willing to drop routing to them.

You can self host. It helps. Won't help you if major ISPs decide your self hosted ip shouldn't exist online.

I would argue that the vast majority of self-hosting business-cases/needs are not as 'edge' as KiwiFarms.

True, but only if you threaten their business model, which is unlikely if you selfhost for yourself and relatives.

There's a huge difference between some random techie self-hosting their own website and email for personal use, and a server full of people who spew hate and actively attack others.

If you're worried about getting the same treatment as KiwiFarms...maybe don't spread hate or dox and stalk people??

https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

Governments make the same arguments. If you want encryption you are either a terrorist, or extremist. Everybody should be able to self host, and nobody should be looked down upon for selfhosting.

It is not a bad thing that somebody wants not to rely on any centralized government or corporate system, or want their data to be private.

Centralized bodies are prone to abuse power. We should work towards decentralized systems, and towards self hosting.

I mean, I agree that we should both promote and support self-hosting, but it does not at all follow that what happened to KiwiFarms was in any way an injustice or a cautionary tale about the horrors of centralized power.

If the ability to self-host came, without exception, at the cost of being able to prevent groups like KiwiFarms from bullying, harassing and abusing people, then it would not be worth it.

Fortunately, that's not the case! We can have a middle ground, where people who treat each other with respect and dignity can self-host without fear, and people who abuse the system to actively harm others can be taken offline.

This is a feature, not a bug.

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