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.
You can always store stuff on public datacenters for reliability in encrypted form. This also lets you break up the ZIP files into whatever size is most optimal for the connection & whatever they do with it. This might be easier for your family members to unlock since they don’t have to deal with extricating shit from storage devices. You can teach them how to unlock the ZIP files with your password while you’re still alive and shit