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selfhosting.couchsurfing
@surfhosting@mastodon.pirateparty.be  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

so, some random thoughts on #selfhosting decisions I've made as a technically-homeless semi-nomadic digital serf:

it would benefit me to be "dogfooding" Nextcloud more than I do, because my partner in Wordpress crime and I are learning it in order to be able to sell services installing & maintaining it for people who don't want to use MS365 or G Suite.

I do use Nextcloud for purposes related to our business together, but I don't yet have a personal install.

for calendar, todo, and contacts I use an install of Baikal on a penny webhost, with aCalendar and Tasks.org on my Android device (a desktop frontend is an unsolved problem)

for notes & documentation, I use Tiddlywiki

for file sync, I use Syncthing.

Nextcloud could do all of this in one fell swoop, so why don't I use that instead?

the answer, in short, has to do with *resilience* - specifically in the context of life instability which leads to an occasional inability to pay bills.

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selfhosting.couchsurfing
@surfhosting@mastodon.pirateparty.be replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

now one could observe that I have my own servers, and can and do host a bunch of stuff reverse-proxied thru a $1/mo VPS. so why not #selfhost Nextcloud that way?

well... I do. that's how I host our business Nextcloud, which we use for file sync, wiki documentation, and maybe kanban in the future.

but that isn't the right choice for my personal setup.

when it comes to calendar+todo+contacts, wiki for note keeping, and personal file sync - I need these services to remain viable for as long as possible even if life renders me incapacitated for months. these are core services. they must work properly and be available, or I have got big problems. my limitations in my current life situation are cognitive, and if I lose access to those services, I might not be able to come back from it.

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selfhosting.couchsurfing
@surfhosting@mastodon.pirateparty.be replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

with my CalDAV+CardDAV setup, it costs me about $0.06/day, domain included, on a webhost where I can prepay as much as I want. so, dropping $20 in my account will keep that service available for almost an entire year, even if the entire rest of my setup becomes unavailable for any reason. and if I stopped using my own domain for it, which I will probably do the next time I reinstall my phone, the cost would be down to about $0.02/day.

with Tiddlywiki, as long as I have access to my Tiddlywiki files on a device that can run a fairly modern browser and a copy of rclone, I'm in business. no need whatsoever for any other infrastructure (although I sync my Tiddlywikis to multiple devices with Syncthing so I have multiple redundant copies).

in fact, my very first lesson in why I should set things up this way came over 10 years ago, when I experienced the first acute burnout of my life, couldn't pay my hosting bill, and lost access to all my personal notes because they were stored in Mediawiki on a $3/mo webhost. all I had was a MySQL dump to pick thru, and when my brain came back online, Mediawiki was 3 or 4 major versions ahead.

NEVER AGAIN.

it's the same with Syncthing. I can set it up on any device built within the last 15 to 20 years and it Just Works, and then I have another copy of my files.

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