I am not a software guru, so I cannot set up a lot of these self-hosted programs by myself. So these services that allow simple old me to selfhost programs have been a blessing. I have tried out yunohost and CasaOS, and I’m going to try out Freedombox shortly after writing this because it caught my interest when I looked it up.

I have used Yunohost for years now. By my count, I have installed and tested 47 programs with yunohost. Many of them were to test which I wanted for a specified purpose (miniflux vs selfoss for rss, lychee vs photoprism for pictures, etc). Without yunohost, these programs would have been inaccessible to me. And in the process, I have learned a few things about yunohost. Most programs install to subdomains so you have have a number of programs installed on the same system, but some programs MUST be installed to the main domain. And I never could get those to install if I already had programs installed to subdomains. Those programs would need to be installed first, THEN you could install the rest after it got its main domain spot. Not easy to to figure out unless you know that ahead of time. Also, if two programs you need both require the main domain, you can only have one; that is, unless you set up a second domain in yunohost. Then you could install both as the main in each domain. I haven’t tried that, but I have tried moving installed programs from one domain to a different one and everything worked well. I have upgraded yunohost to new versions and things worked well, and I have upgraded the programs and that also worked smoothly; EXCEPT for one time with nextcloud. Several years ago, the nextcloud upgrade broke something about the database and I had to reinstall it. But I’ve also used TrueNAS on an old computer and installed nextcloud with it before and it also broke nextcloud, so that seems to be something I have to worry about with that specific program… Anyway, I love yunohost and would recommend it.

I actually tried out CasaOS this year. I’ve heard a lot about docker and CasaOS and figured I’d play with it and see how it is. It worked well when I installed my programs on it. It doesn’t have as large a list as yunohost, but the ones it had worked well. My hope was that since it used docker, I could install other programs packed with docker on it as well, which would ovecome the smaller store. So I went to the miniflux website and found their docker-compose instructions and tried to use that to install it with CasaOS. It failed. Since I am not a docker person, I couldn’t tell you why it failed; it was likely my fault but that doesn’t matter to me because it means that couldn’t easily install other programs outside the store with CasaOS. And if that’s the case, I’d rather stick with yunohost, which was lighter on resource use and has worked well for me. Because of the bigger store, yunohost allows me to test a much wider variety of programs, which I appreciate. If you know what you want to host and it is in CasaOS, or you know more about docker than me, then CasaOS was a fine system. I just prefer yunohost.

I have heard of freedombox and looked at it YEARS ago, but it had very few programs I was interested in. However, I took a look at its website when I read this post and it has piqued my interest. Based of the programs in its catalogue, it seems to curate the resource-lite programs into it (I see miniflux rather than the heavier, flashier selfoss; zoph rather than immich;shaarli rather than linkwarden or readeck). That really fits with the programs I want to use so I decided to install it in a virtual machine to try it out. First, it seems that some of the programs I wanted to try (miniflux) were on their website, but not available in the system. I looked into it and it seems they have 2 setups: debian stable, and debian testing. A number of their programs are ready in testing, and will available in the next stable release this year. Ironically, the programs I wanted to try were in testing: featherwiki, miniflux, nextcloud, and tiddlywiki. So I tried to upgrade to debian testing but failed. Freedombox asked a lot of networking questions during install, so maybe there is more to upgrading now than just changing the apt sources file. No problem, i just started a new virtual machine with debian testing and installed freedombox again. I have to say, the install, the networking questions, and the Next Steps messages were all top notch. I wouldn’t know how to set up a lot of that, but with the guided questions, it set it up and it works. The service has 2 main views: apps and system. the system view is well laid out and seems straightforward. Miniflux installed without issue and works.

Hilariously, nextcloud installed but when I tried to use it it told me “Access through untrusted domain.” Their page does state “Nextcloud is considered experimental in FreedomBox having to do with the integration of the Nextcloud container in the FreedomBox system.” and “Please note that Nextcloud is installed and run inside a container provided by the Nextcloud community” so it certainly is still considered unfinished (thus being only in debian testing). I found in the documentation that is is a podman container and that until last spring it was not even accessible to install until more testing was done. So I may have just chosen the one program that hasn’t been ironed out yet. However, in poking around, I did see that the nextcloud page on my freedombox had options to run diagnostics, rerun setup, backup, restore, and uninstall. All of those are appreciated, but didn’t help my current issue. I don’t know how to enter podman or docker containers, so I’m stuck at the moment, but I’m on irc to see if freedombox devs/users can help me sort this out. While I did encounter a failure here, I was using a testing branch so that comes with the territory.

I am actually VERY impressed with this project and will keep trying it out. I don’t know if it will replace yunohost for my actual, used selfhost projects, but yunohost will always have a place for me in testing new programs :)

I went a step further and have user-installed flatpaks with a custom flatpak directory so everything installs on a separate small hard drive. If the whole system goes down (usually due to my testing things!), I can reinstall set up the custom flatpak and everything works again. In theory. But it borks inter-flatpak communication (flatseal cannot find any other flatpaks and is thus unusable). I moved over to distrobox (which has its own issues, but works better for the OS wiped/reinstall scenario).

I absolutely would not recommend “investing” this this stuff. The domain is ripe with scammers and

I loved the idea of bitcoin as a decentralized currency. However, to this day it has proven it is not a currency because it is used for investing and speculating. People in some countries use USD rather than their local currency because of the unstable nature of their curency. Bitcoin is not stable so the only way it works as a currency is if you buy bitcoin and immediate use as it won’t hold its value.

But the idea seems so wonderful for a solarpunk world. Is there anyway a cryptocurrency could be made that wasn’t investing/scamming/etc?

I just took a look at the docs on zknotes, which show off how zknotes work. I really love the links at the bottom of each document! Do the links break if you change the title of the other note? I had that happen in QOwnNotes and it was a very annoying realization after I’d renamed a bunch of notes to standardize things.

when I was starting Tiddlywiki I think I was bouncing between which one to try, Dokuwiki or Tiddlywiki. I decided on TW since it didn’t need a server to run. Considering how it was a race between those two, this suggestion hits the nail on the head. Like the other commenter, I would prefer something that doesn’t require a server, but since it just uses text files, even if I don’t have access to the server I can view the text file and edit them on the go as long as i have them sync to the device when it is active. Since my sever is LAN only, I just need to learn how to setup a vpn connection to my server when I’m away from the office and this program would be even more convenient. Maybe I should get on that sooner. Always something to learn and do! Now what to prioritize first~

wiki.js looks really great. I have to put this on my list of things to try out. One worry I have is how lightweight it is on tiny computers. I use are older devices, like a raspberry pi 2, so I’m always wary if programs like this will be smooth. When I started organizing my notes, I tried Joplin because it seems so universally loved. It was a good program but it was nigh unusable on my raspberry pi 2. So that worry is always in the back of my head now when I’m looking for software longterm (and why I will never use an electron app again as it is not a framework that cares about older devices). Since this is on a server, maybe it will be lightweight on devices. I don’t know how much fancy web features it uses and I guess I’ll have to test it to see how it goes. thank you!

Thank you for the suggestion. I’m taking notes on the suggestions everyone has put forward to try out in the future. But thanks to a comment by @stsquad@lemmy.ml, I realized I was thinking wrong in how I tried to use tiddlywiki. I was trying to get it to act like another program, which was more straightforward in workflow, but after sqaud’s suggestion, I considered starting from a text file of my data and thinking about what I’d need on top of that to work. I’ve got some ideas now and it makes Tiddlywiki look less intimidating and confusing than prior. It won’t make use of all the fancy features TW has, but it will work for me I think. And I can always go back and add fancy features later when I’m used to TW. Those notes you linked will definitely be useful so thank you.

I’m impressed by this suggestion. It accomplishes most of what I asked and is elegant in its simplicity. It also shifted my perspective to look at the very basic needs and consider what I need on top of that. Which was actually very helpful for me. I will not be going this route, but your suggestion is greatly appreciated.