I’ve been building a project to preserve family voices, stories, photos, and history, and one question has influenced almost every design decision:
Should something this personal ever require people to trust someone else’s servers?
That’s what pushed me toward making it open source and fully self-hostable. If someone wants to keep their family’s memories on hardware they own, they should be able to.
That said, I know not everyone wants to run a server, so I’m also offering a managed hosted version. The idea isn’t to lock anyone into a platform or build another big cloud service—it simply helps fund the project for people who’d rather not manage the infrastructure themselves.
For those of you who self-host, I’m curious:
Would you actually self-host something this personal?
What would make you trust (or distrust) a project like this?
What are some mistakes you’ve seen developers make when they say they support self-hosting?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing how this community thinks about it before I finish everything up.
No. The only one in my family with skills or motivation to maintain it is me.
If I was going to do something managed, I would use a big cloud service, because even with Google enshittifying and killing projects all the time, it’s still more reliable than some random guy.
But there’s not much point in that when a couple archival-quality scrapbooks, journals, photo albums, and video/audio interviews can do the same thing with no rug to pull.
Yeah I felt the same, but figured that out would be good for people to have options 😃 especially to the point of being the only one in the family with the skills or motivation… I’m about the only technical one so I wanted to make it easy enough (the app itself more than the technical upkeep) so that they could just use it like they do Facebook but it still their data that they can own if they want