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Comment by kavouras | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the idea of moving from google's ecosystem to proton. While they're better, ecosystems tend to get locked down or change for the worse.I'm not planning to repeat the google cycle. I got my own domain for email, bitwarden for passwords, firefox forks for browsing, and many other stuff to get off google. Also I realised that stuff like contacts, notes, calendar don't really need to be on the cloud, but I'm planning to self host some services like that, mostly for the nerd in me.

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We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.

Owning your domain just changes your point of failure from Google to your registrar. It is not, in fact, any safer.

It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.

It's easier to keep track of your own IP addresses than whatever you'd hosts or DNS hack to over at Google.

But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.

It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.

It's always a varying grade, not either/or.

The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.

Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.

If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.

Yes, I've started to think about this more seriously now in the UK. I have moderate political opinions, but I now ask myself will they be acceptable now or in the near future by the UK government or where my data is hosted (i.e. the US). Will I suddenly have an email account blocked or closed down for supporting a non-violent cause I believe in?

Horrible times when this has started to become a part of my thought process.

Your registrar won't use automated tools to suddenly close your account. They have no reason to look at anything you're doing and most likely won't care as long as you pay your bills and they can pay theirs.

Google knows what you watch and post on Youtube, your emails, your google drive contents, your photos, contacts and everything. Any bit of that can trigger an automated ban for your account you can't recover from unless you know a Googler personally or can get through to their only working customer service outlet: the front page of HN.

True, just happened to one of my friend. 10 years old gmail account got suspended because he supposedly sent phishing emails. Which is completely false (he didn’t even understood what pishing was, he had google authenticator for totp). Ofcourse the appeal process was useless as no one reply to those. It’s been 2 months now. Own your domain.

Well WebDav/CalDav/CardDav works quite OK. Baïkal is trivial to selfhost (cal+card) then you just pick some webdav implementation like KaraDav/PicoDav/FlyDav and you are good.

Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.

You can self host email in an afternoon, its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

It's not about configuration but rather your IP reputation and the struggle to not have your mail go straight to addressee's spam folder.

Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP and setting up DMARC and DKIM.

I see this reasoning as the #1 reason not to self host, but it really isn't a big issue once you do the initial setup.

> Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP

Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?

Use an IP reputation tool like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

What you will find is that many dedicated IP's from larger vendors are fine.

I personally use Hetzner and don't have any issues with reputation at all.

I had troubles with Apple blocking a bunch of range IPs from OVH, because they don’t handle abuse claims. It didn’t show up in blocklists at the time, but was in practice unusable.

IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays and deliverability is always crap (with luck it lands on spam folder).

IMHO the problem starts when you need to share your calendar with the outside, then you need to expose that service to the Internet and, to me, it's a whole different level of complexity making sure it remains safe.

If read only is good enough, a simple export of the .ics to a bucket can suffice.

Yes I'm aware, what I'm saying is, in the time between setting up my home server again, I've realised it's not even that useful. I used to think that having my todo and calendar locally on my phone was unusable.

With proton, at least, you can just use your own domain and if they ever get bad, you just point the MX record to some other service, or self host, and pretty much have it taken care of.

I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.

By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN

Perhaps you might like syncthing?

Yes what would be better is a "libsyntching" that i can plug to a software so that it does not require additional brain power, i.e install Note app on device A and B, pair them once, fire and forget.

This year I moved off LastPass, and started using [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) to sync my [KeepassXC](https://keepassxc.org/). It works pretty well, but doesn't have any automatic conflict resolution (I've been working on [something](https://github.com/LightAndLight/syncthing-merge) for this).

Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.

Firefox sync clearly requires a central server. For any kind of peer to peer syncing to work you must have the machines on at the same time and accessible. And then there is the issue of NATs, including CGNATs. To work reliably these almost always have to have some kind of relays anyway (Tailscale's DERP, Syncthing also has relays).

For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.

Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install. As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue

I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)

But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.

Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.

Google has very good PR, people still can't grasp that they're an ad company that dabbles in hardware and services.

  > I got my own domain for email

Doesn't this make migrating easier? Since you are just changing where it directs to?

Edit: s/mining/migrating

Mining?

lol thanks for the catch. Meant migrating

It's a non profit so I think the risk of change for the worse is little.

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