Hey everyone,
I was thinking if it would be worth hosting an instance of SearXNG, Invidous for Youtube and NextCloud for office and sync tasks in the same server an have them all in the page to make like an opensource alternative of what Google or major proprietary search engines do?
PS: For the email side I don't know which solutions would be good.
Mailcow email
Immich photos
Ah yeah I heard of Mailcow thanks for reminder
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Well, Mail server is the least in my list tbh.
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Mailcow is a really cool tool. Unfortunately, they have zero ability to ensure your e-mails get delivered. Selfhosting email is nearly impossible if you want to actually send email to anyone on other email services.
It's absolutely no problem as long as you have an ip that it not blacklisted in any way (either directly or the entire subnet). After configuring the usual security stuff like DKIM and TLSA all of my mails to providers like GMail get delivered.
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While I don’t selfhost mail (I use fastmail with my own domain), people on HN usually say that while it’s work, with a static IP it’s absolutely doable and saying “nearly impossible” is FUD.
Don’t spread hearsay, especially on something you haven’t done.
I ran my own email server (as in I configured Dovecot and Postfix myself, old school and all) for well over a decade.
About 5 ish years ago it started getting difficult to ensure deliverability.
Now? It really is damn near impossible to start up a new email server and have anything end up in somebody else’s inbox on one of the big providers.
The amount of hoops you have to jump through is ridiculous. Sure, you could do it, but you’ll be constantly fighting to keep deliverability up.
You’re also very vulnerable to someone on the same ASN getting you blocked as well. Do you own the IP addresses that you will be using?
Most of the cloud providers out there are almost universally blocked because of abuse by spammers.
If you went through the effort to colocate at some local data center and use IP addresses that you exclusively own on your own ASN, yeah, you could probably pull it off.
Stating anything else is FUD.
Selfhosting email is a for “fun” activity now. It’s an endless excercise in frustration if you need to actually send emails to anyone else.
It’s yet another thing ruined by spammers… and the big tech companies are all more than happy to make life difficult for anyone smaller than them.
It's hard for everyone, that's why "please look in your spam folder" is everywhere. This is personal anecdote, but I also have an email server and don't have delivery problems. It's a bit tiresome to keep up to the latest email sending fad, but then I have a server because I like to manage servers, so it's part of the fun.
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Delivery issues and blacklisting you described sounds more like server misconfiguration leading to spam or domain spoofing - I’d double check dns for sending domains and ensure validity of dmarc/spf/dkim, as well as do some reporting on what’s flowing through the server(s) to ensure there’s not an actual outbound spam problem
I’ve done all of that, and still had deliverability issues.
I was very early in supporting IPv6, SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
I had reporting on all of the mail that Postfix sent (it was only mine)
Mail Tester gave me perfect scores
I went through all of the major DNSBL providers, confirmed I was not on any of them, and completed the applications for whitelist on those that supported it.
I even tried switching hosting providers (multiple times, because I don’t own my IP addresses, unfortunately, I’m not that rich)!
All of that, and I’d still have unreliable deliverability to the big providers.
Its not worth the headache. I spent over 2 years trying absolutely everything, and would still get rejected, ignored, black holed, whatever, with Google, Microsoft, etc.
Prior to all of this I had a flawless, spam free, mail server of my own. It happily sat, on the same IP address, for years.
If you’ve got it working currently, great! More power to you, but it’s not typical at all.
It’s not in their best interest to make it easy for you to deliver to them.
It isn't just static IP, it is reverse DNS. Your service provider needs to be willing to configure reverse DNS for you.
Mailcow is a really cool tool. Unfortunately, they have zero ability to ensure your e-mails get delivered. Selfhosting email is nearly impossible if you want to actually send email to anyone on other email services.
I use a payed SMTP relay in order to send my mails. Not perfectly self hosted but at least all the ingoing mail goes only to my server.
That seems like a really good way to go about it. I gave up pretty early on when I decided I wanted to try hosting my email and never made it that far.
With mailcow you just run the update script every once in a while after running the backup script (and subscribe to their RSS feed, where they sometimes disclose vulnerabilities) and you'll be fine. Deliverability is not much of an issue if you set up everything according to the docs and the mailtesters give you a full score. Of course some individual mail servers have some stupid extra requirements but this is pretty much unsolvable
+1 for mailcow
Nextcloud + mailcow. Job done.
Searx is ok. Personally I would not recommend hosting anything you allow to be public facing on the same server as your mail/Nextcloud though. Which means hiding searx behind something like authelia. Which in turn makes it a faff for a quick search.
At that point, given searx’s short comings in search quality compared to the traditional ones, I personally just stuck with DuckDuckGo as my default and use searx when I want to be private.
I'm using searxng a while and my setup ist stupid simple. Just start a local docker Container and expose the port to 127.0.0.1:123x:8080 Now you have always a secure local search engine for you.
I mean yeah, if you only want it locally.
Which means hiding searx behind something like authelia. Which in turn makes it a faff for a quick search.
Sure, if you have to log in every single time. But hopefully it stays logged in.
That’s exactly my point in protecting it if you install it on the same server as Nextcloud/mailcow. It’s inconvenient and therefore a bad idea. But not as much of a bad idea as hosting a public facing service on the same server that you use to host your personal, private information and communications.
I must be misunderstanding something. What is it that makes it inconvenient?
Having to log into an authentication system everytime you want to use your personal searx instance.
If you use it solely on one machine it’s not too bad, but if you want to use it across other devices or set it as the default search engine across multiple machines the authentication stops that from working.
E.g in Firefox you can set searx as your default search engine if it’s publicly exposed.
But authelia has an option remain logged in, and iirc you can adjust how long it should remain logged in for. Logging in once a week or monthly isn't much of an inconvenience.
Not refreshing the login is less secure, but works.
But to me there’s no point using searx if you can’t integrate it or at some point you just end up leaking information anyway via your phone, tablet, etc. much better when you can set them all to your preferred search provider, but it usually requires it to be publicly accessible. 👍🏻
Are there any free alternatives to Nextcloud? I want to self-host, but price is a big factor for me looking forward.
Nextcloud is free they just hide it a bit because they want to obviously advertise their paid for services.
https://nextcloud.com/athome/
I would recommend running it in a VM rather than docker if you go for it. It’s easier to optimise/tune the server for performance IMHO. I tried docker first but found it sluggish. It’s much more performant in a VM after doing all the server tuning steps.
Don’t forget to give their security checker a go, to check how secure your installation is, quite handy.
Also, you can tie Nextcloud into SSO services like Authentik or Authelia using SAML and OIDC quite nicely. It works really well. Helps to reduce the number of passwords you need and provisions accounts automatically.
Thanks for the info, appreciate it. Honestly, not really sure how VMs or Docker works. On a Windows machine right now, hoping to eventually move to a NAS. Have heard good things about Docker, but not sure what it really is, and not sure if it's something that relies on an internet connection. Always like to have my stuff available remotely and offline (locally).
Docker is sinilar to a VM except you share the kernel with the host. It (more or less) is headless though. So instead of installing an OS on it, you declare what you want on it and it builds it when you first run it. Technically you can access the CLI once it’s running but typically it’s better to define how you want it and then buke and replace the container.
You can set a location on the host to “passthrough” to the container so with something like Nextcloud, they do the effort of configuring how it should be deployed. All you have to do is “Docker-compose [configuration file].yaml -d” and if you’ve put the right name of the repository in the yaml file, it’ll download everything it needs and that’s basically it. Files are saved in your machine so if you need to upgrade you can just pull the image… Docker nukes the container and rebuilds it and you have a new updated code Rainer and all your files intact.
Nextcloud perhaps?
NXC has a mail server option?
Nextcloud doesn't have a mail server built-in. I believe you would need mailcow as well, but Nextcloud can connect to any mail server that you want. Nextcloud has file management, viewing, playback, encryption, sharing, permissions, extensions, etc. Definitely ticks a lot of the boxes if you're looking for an all-in-one replacement to Google Services.
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Screw photos, check out memories, it's actually faster than google photos, integrates well with recognize and soon face recognition
Sounds good thanks!
Sure thing, happy to help if you have any questions :)
Umbrel has these things. Is Umbrel well liked on this sub?
From the comments I saw, no.
People didn't liked how it forced Crypto and Tor.
Hey I've been working on getting something like this organized & live for a while now!
There's a few good options right now like Nextcloud, ownCloud, Umbrel (if you like crypto), or Yunohost for a self hosted package manager basically, or even HomeLabOS that is the closest to a full stack solution imo.
I've always said that you can't make a fully open source ecosystem with just an App Store/Plugins/Extension Store, there are subsequent abstraction layers you have to account for. That's why Nextcloud isn't a full solution to "deGoogling". A lot of what deGoogling implies is that it's simple & safe to use, easy to install/signup for, & most of all it just works.
but it's just like the 'year of the Linux desktop' where +80% of people don't want to deal with the problems that Google/MS/Apple just solve for their users.
Once you get deep into self hosting/open source you realize that the UX always comes with annoying problems that would not be tolerated by a megacorp.
There will be tradeoffs with everything but for right now, it's a lot of scattered projects that need a lot of glue for them to work together. Wish you the best of luck & what's help me the most on my journey is the AwesomeOSS database & AwesomeOSS self hosted repos!
Thx a lot
Cryptpad
Look into yunohost, it’s project to manage self hosted app . And all the apps you cited and more are in their catalogue
Thanks
Actually checking their catalogue is a great way to address your question.
https://yunohost.org/en/apps
It’s a great resource for open source services / apps / utils
Thx
Docker-mailserver + nextcloud
cloudron, is a mailserver, and you can add nextcloud (plus one other thing for free) If you want more cloudron apps, it costs, but its nicely integrated. I even have a referral link if you like. :)
Like others say nextcloud but if your keen I'm in the process of trying to pick this apart https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/ecloud-selfhosting I think e/os is great because they have a room for the phone with it baked I to the back for connecting to the self hosted option... But I haven't got the docker dompoae to work in my environment quite yet and I don't want to just run there install cause it will break other services for me.
Hope this helps -
Also, some aren't really self-host options, I suggested them since the word "ecosystem" was used and got confused by what was exactly required.
EDIT: Re-read the question. I'm an idiot, leaving my answer up anyways.
EDIT2: Replaced Drone with Woodpecker per u/KrazyKirby99999's suggestion
EDIT3: Added an IDP per u/brygphilomena's suggestion
Thanks a lot for this detailed reply!
That'd be the ultimate Ecosystem.
I am gathering the ideas for the project as I would like to do it to provide to people like you and me who use Opensource software or Operating systems.
Wondering if this would make any sense as a big public project.
To get a sense of what two organizations already host freely, take a look at Disroot and Framasoft.
They look good thx.
I love initiatives like this. I personally think that there's definitely a demand for this stuff. Not for all the services but definitely some of them.
For example:
Basic stuff like Pastebin/Notes doesn't have many non-closeed source options. So a Microbin instance would do wonders.
On the other hand, there a decent number e-mail providers, even ones that serve the privacy niche. So if e-mail is lower on your priority list then it won't be a big problem.
For communications, Matrix.org hosts the largest Matrix instance. So most people will flock there. Therefore self-hosting Matrix for non-personal/organizational use might not be too beneficial.
Translation is mostly done using closed source services. Which sort of makes sense considering they leverage DeepL but I'm sure an open source service can work.
Workspace alternatives are also quite a few in number however, Cryptpad's focus on privacy isn't found everywhere. I'm sure a Cryptpad insurance would help the people quite a bit.
This is my take, I could be wrong. The important thing is to do things in a way that you don't burn a hole in your pocket. Even if donations come your way, managing costs by prioritizing what you choose to self-host as a public service should be done imo.
Also, if you do end up going through with it. I'd personally recommend dropping search engine altogether. Crawling the web is expensive and AFAIK only Brave, Gigablast and Mojeek don't extensively rely on Bing/Google. Even DDG relies heavily on Bing despite having its own crawler. So you'd end up relying on the usual suspects one way or the other. It's not worth the effort imo plus there are a lot of Searx instances.
Thanks for your honest thoughts on this!
For translation, use simplytranslate... Libretranslate is a good idea but its translation is utter garbage. Simplytranslate is a private frontend of Google's translate engine.
Wouldn't Woodpecker be better than Drone?
I am not familiar with Woodpecker. It looks like a fork of Drone so that alone is aces in my book.
Would you mind sharing why it's better?
Nice list. Worth noting that apps installed through the aurora store are pulled from google play and often have their own glorified spyware.
I would add an idP here. You really want a way to tie these together with a single login. Something like authentik.
Why the hell you choose TAILS as a replacement of chromeOS?
What else would you recommend? I'm open to suggestions.