mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitchA small Croatian collective sharing thoughts on privacy, FOSS, Linux, self-hosting & computer science. Project updates, news, and our honest takes. We believe in a free and open internet.
#FOSS #Linux #Privacy
Some of the services we self-host on our trusty 2013 server — and what they replace:
🎵 Spotify → Navidrome
📷 Google Photos → Immich
💬 Discord → Matrix
🐙 GitHub → Forgejo
🤖 ChatGPT → Open WebUI + Ollama
🔖 Browser bookmarks → Linkwarden
You don't need the latest hardware to take back control. A decade-old machine can be a solid foundation for self-hosting. Your data. Your hardware. Your rules. 🏠
PSA for fellow self-hosters: bots will probe your services. We caught one trying to scrape sensitive files via CrowdSec — .env variants, AWS credentials, config files, and more. Others targeted common PHP/WordPress misconfigs.
If you're running anything public-facing, assume it's being scanned.
For a while, deploying apps meant a familiar ritual: SSH in, pull the repo, pray nothing breaks, repeat for every service.
Manual.
Fragile.
Exhausting.
This week I finally consolidated everything into a proper self-hosted control plane.
The stack:
→ aaPanel as the central dashboard which I heard about from a friend
→ Docker for containerised app isolation (absolute cancer)
→ PostgreSQL for database management (with per-app panels and log visibility)
→ DuckDNS handling dynamic DNS + automated HTTPS via Let's Encrypt (stayed up until 3AM on Sunday for this btw)
→ Netlify on the frontend side cuz it's easy to deploy
The difference is hard to overstate.
One dashboard.
Full log access across services.
Deployments that don't require me to remember 12 steps in the right order at 11pm.
It's not a perfect setup, aaPanel is proprietary-ish and Netlify is clearly not self-hosted, but it's a defenitely a step away from "I'll fix it manually when it breaks" territory.
Curious if anyone here has migrated from this kind of hybrid setup toward something fully FOSS.
Always looking for the next rabbit hole.
— UltraX
#SelfHosting #DevOps #Docker #FOSS #Linux #Infrastructure #HomeServer #OpenSource #Privacy #Sysadmin #Python #javascript #saas
Spent some time on Arch, came back to my work laptop on Win11 to find Microsoft had "gifted" me a file search app I never asked for — Recall quietly screenshotting everything in the background — plus a handful of other bloat now sitting in my uninstall queue.
I just want an OS. Not a surveillance box filled with unwanted software.
— SeBa
Fun fact: LinkedIn’s JavaScript bundle contains a hardcoded list of 6,222 Chrome extension IDs, each paired with a specific internal file path that LinkedIn engineers mapped manually.
They probe your browser using three escalating detection methods. If one fails, they try the next.
It’s not subtle. It’s in the source code. Anyone can verify it.
browsergate.eu
Running a locally hosted abliterated (uncensored) DeepSeek R1 8B with web search enabled, and I got it to discuss the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in full detail — something the stock model refuses to do.
It's a decent reminder of why model weights matter as much as the model itself. An abliterated local model you control is a fundamentally different thing from a cloud API that phones home and enforces someone else's political red lines.
Self-hosted AI isn't just about privacy. Sometimes it's about who gets to decide what's true.
— Helix
When solving a problem using conventional methods (googling, relying on your own knowledge) you're searching for the solution through trial-and-error.
In comparison, using LLMs renders exhaustive search for the solution obsolete as they directly lead you to the answer. In terms of speed, LLMs are an obvious win here.
But now the question is, have we lost something from avoiding the trial-and-error process, something which cannot be acquired through AI-assisted problem solving? The experience we gain through trial-and-error and deeper understanding of the concepts come to mind. In practice, I'm drawn to the LLM approach due to how ridiculously fast it is. But at the end of the day, it feels like I'm becoming dependent on it and can't do anything without it. And the fear that I missed the chance of exploring it more deeply myself continues to linger on.
I'm still figuring out where to draw the line between those two approaches.
— Helix
Our blog is live — and so is its first article.
Helix wanted to try their hand at a physical DIY project for once — most of their work is purely software. The goal: build a portable temperature & humidity monitor from scratch to tackle a real problem at home: poor insulation and rooms humid enough to grow mold.
ESP32 + DHT22 + a few euros of AliExpress parts. The article covers the circuit design, prototyping, and some tricks along the way. It's a work in progress — more updates coming as the project evolves.
🔗 https://blog.foobardevs.com/posts/diy-esp32-temp-hum-monitor/