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.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    82·
    2 days ago

    Here’s some questions:

    • What happens when you die?
    • What happens if your house is burgled or catches fire?
    • How do you protect against pe(s)ts making themselves at home in your server?
    • What happens with a power or internet outage?
    • What happens with hardware failure?
    • What happens if you suffer dementia?
    • How are you dealing with AI bots?
    • How are you mitigating hacking attempts, security, authentication and exploits?
    • How are you dealing with data corruption?
    • How do you mitigate against ransomware having entered your systems?

    Note that I’m not picking on you, nor is this list comprehensive or in priority order. I’m trying to determine if you’ve considered these common issues and concerns associated with hosting stuff that has great sentimental value, if not actual value.

    • preludeofme@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 day ago

      Don’t feel picked on at all, these are great questions! Here’s my thoughts:

      What happens when you die?

      • this is a great question and I’m actually adding an option where you can assign family members to be able to access your account and be able to upload the local content to the hosted. That way it can easily go from self hosted to cloud for when that happens and there’s nobody technical to keep it up with a single button.

      [I grouped the below questions together with the same answer] This is where backups matter, and I’m thinking of setting up a backup system where you can have it backed up wherever you want instead of using the hosted services I’ll have up. Or at the very least a make it easy to setup for people

      • What happens if your house is burgled or catches fire?
      • How do you protect against pe(s)ts making themselves at home in your server?
      • What happens with a power or internet outage?
      • What happens with hardware failure?
      • What happens if you suffer dementia?
      • How are you dealing with data corruption?

      [And the below grouped] This is where I’m looking at industry standards for managing and mitigating. Ensuring I have proper API key rotations, security scans, etc. The AI bots is interesting but I think needing an account for content should help on this side

      • How are you dealing with AI bots?
      • How are you mitigating hacking attempts, security, authentication and exploits?
      • How do you mitigate against ransomware having entered your systems?

      Really some great questions that got me thinking and making some changes to it

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
        1·
        1 day ago

        Excellent. Thank you.

        Now look at the questions again and when you read the word “you”, insert “preludeofme”.

        I’m asking because you’re also wanting to offer a service to customers.

        • preludeofme@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          1 day ago

          Oh as far as the hosting side? Well I’m not hosting it on my hardware, but as far as support goes that part will be on me and the open source community. If there’s enough interest beyond just me then I’ll probably get some help on the support side but I don’t think it’s going to require too much beyond what I already do. But definitely point taken

    • thain@piefed.nlEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      this is certainly a good list of questions, but isn’t the answer to most of them just good backup hygiene? and how are ai bots a threat to me?

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
        6·
        2 days ago

        AI bots will hammer your endpoints into the ground if left unchecked. They’ll happily compromise your services while they’re at it.

        • preludeofme@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          1 day ago

          It looks like cloudflare has some mitigating services in place you can implement but that’s for sure something I’m starting to look at