Thoughts and questions about fediverse, digital autonomy, tools, …

HelenaGwyn

Hi everyone

This might be a lengthy read but I would like to share some thoughts and questions about a few things, maybe not all of them specifically OpalStack-related, but hoping some in this community might take time to share their insights or experiences.

For some time now I’ve been pondering about and looking into moving my data away from big tech on all platforms, being mail, cloud storage, social media, … into my own setup using self hosting and/or more privacy-friendly solutions, for myself at first as a test case and eventually for my more conscious clients as well.

Hosting

For hosting my first choice is OpalStack because it has a human customer service that thinks with you looking for solutions instead of some bot, FAQ or mindless helpdesk. My hosting for websites and applications happens mostly here. For cloudstorage I’m currently using a 1TB Nextcloud-share at another location. DNS is done with Cloudflare.

Fediverse

When I look at the fediverse that could replace social media, I understand that you can join or setup some of the available tools depending on what you want to share. I haven’t dabbled with it actively, but do I understand correctly that if you share something on mastodon, any client or tool could follow that, f.e. someone on pixelfed could follow that mastodon feed and the other way around? Or are there limits to consider?

For websites I mainly use Wordpress for a few reasons. I understand that with the right plugin the content on a Wordpress would instantly become available on the fediverse as well. Is that correct?

Are there other fediversetools that can be hosted on Opalstack besides Mastodon. I’m mainly looking at Peertube to replace Youtube, Pixelfed as instagram replacement, maybe funkwhale to serve music. And if your were to setup something like Facebook within the fediverse, what would you recommend?

Matrix

There’s also Matrix with clients like Element? Has anyone used that to setup a private chat network? Can it be run on Opalstack?

Feed-reader

For RSS-feeds I have a FreshRSS running which is fine.
But I would also like to manage newsletter subscriptions with it. I’ve looked at Omnivore, but self-hosting is not that straightforward at the moment. I was thinking of creating my own feeds for newsletters arriving in a dedicated mailbox just for that. Any tips welcome though.

Document-managment

To manage my library of documents I came accross Paperless-NGX. I suppose it can be installed on Opalstack? Has anyone any experience with it?

Notes, projects and tasks are being managed with Obsidian, possibly syncing through my own gitea in the future.

Ebooks are managed with Calibre and Calibre-Web using PocketBook on my tablet to read them.

Passwords and Browsing

For password-storage I use Keepass-databases stored in my Nextcloud connected with Strongbox on all my (Apple)devices. That works pretty well. I’ve been using Apple for many years (after using Linux) and especially love my design tools and capabilities on my iPad. Although it’s becoming more and more of a closed box when it comes to information-managment, hence my thoughts and questions 🙂.

For browsing I would also like a self hosted cross device session syncing solution, but haven’t found one yet. All tips very welcome.

Web-development

As I said, I use Wordpress to design websites growing towards custom block themes. Which CSS framework would you advise though to start from?. I’ve looked at Bootstrap, but Tailwind seems to be getting more and more attention as well. And what about React to develop (native) applications?

I use VSCodium and my own gitea to manage my projects.
I use DevKinsta to develop locally. But recently I also saw Laravel Herd and Wordpress Playground from within VSCodium. Any suggestions on that area?

Analytics

For analytics I use Plausible at the moment. They offer self hosting, but only through docker.
There’s also a Matomo-plugin for Wordpress that manages the analytics straight in Wordpress itself. Has anyone tried that?

Transcription

I’ve also been looking into good offline transcription and translation. But rather new to it and everything AI-related. What would you suggest to easily and budgetfriendly transcribe spoken podcasts?

Shell Account Naming

My last question is rather practical. How do you do the naming of your shell accounts. For applications, databases, etc. there are enough characters to be descriptive. For shell accounts we’re limited to 16 characters. Just wondering what naming-systems are being used by others.

sean

HelenaGwyn For hosting my first choice is OpalStack because it has a human customer service that thinks with you looking for solutions instead of some bot, FAQ or mindless helpdesk.

Thanks! 🙂

HelenaGwyn do I understand correctly that if you share something on mastodon, any client or tool could follow that, f.e. someone on pixelfed could follow that mastodon feed and the other way around?

Yes, as long as the ActivityPub implementations on both ends are using the same type of ActivityPub activities and objects then they can follow each other. This will be the case for most of the popular Fediverse software.

For websites I mainly use Wordpress for a few reasons. I understand that with the right plugin the content on a Wordpress would instantly become available on the fediverse as well. Is that correct?

Yes, the official ActivityPub plugin can do that.

Are there other fediversetools that can be hosted on Opalstack besides Mastodon.

Check the installation procedure for whichever tool. If it does not require a container like Docker and does not require root access then you can probably run it here.

And if your were to setup something like Facebook within the fediverse, what would you recommend?

I would consider which Facebook-like features matter to me the most and then find the platform that comes the closest to providing them.

There’s also Matrix with clients like Element? Has anyone used that to setup a private chat network? Can it be run on Opalstack?

Yes, you can run the matrix-synapse server on Opalstack. You'll need to use the Python module setup procedure. Use a Nginx Proxy Port app to get your port assignment and then route that app to a site.

HelenaGwyn Passwords and Browsing

Firefox sync can be self-hosted but I don't have any experience with it.

HelenaGwyn But I would also like to manage newsletter subscriptions with it. I’ve looked at Omnivore, but self-hosting is not that straightforward at the moment. I was thinking of creating my own feeds for newsletters arriving in a dedicated mailbox just for that. Any tips welcome though.

Personally I would go the other direction - ie instead of trying to shoehorn incoming email into a RSS feed, I would read my RSS feeds in an email client by using rss2email.

HelenaGwyn To manage my library of documents I came accross Paperless-NGX. I suppose it can be installed on Opalstack? Has anyone any experience with it?

The bare metal setup procedure might work but you'll need to change all of the filesystem paths to locations within your home directory, leave out the "yum" commands, and don't use "sudo" on the remaining commands that use it.

sean

HelenaGwyn Which CSS framework would you advise though to start from?. I’ve looked at Bootstrap, but Tailwind seems to be getting more and more attention as well.

DaisyUI is pretty nice, it is a bootstrap-like implementation of Tailwind.

sean

HelenaGwyn My last question is rather practical. How do you do the naming of your shell accounts. For applications, databases, etc. there are enough characters to be descriptive. For shell accounts we’re limited to 16 characters. Just wondering what naming-systems are being used by others.

I keep shell user names and app names as short as possible because a) less typing 😃 and b) there is a 108-character limit on UNIX filesystem socket paths. Many of our installers run applications that listen on sockets, so if you've got a long shell user name and a long app name there is a possibility that limit could be exceeded. If you're running PHP apps like WordPress it's not a concern.

sean

HelenaGwyn For websites I mainly use Wordpress for a few reasons. I understand that with the right plugin the content on a Wordpress would instantly become available on the fediverse as well. Is that correct?

The WP ActivityPub plugin was just updated with some nice enhancements, including federated comments. Pretty neat!

HelenaGwyn

sean Hi Sean, thank you so much for these elaborate replies. I'm looking into all of them one item at a time.
When it comes to Paperless, they don't have extra layers of security and refer to solutions like https://www.authelia.com or https://goauthentik.io to add themm. Are they possible on Opalstack?
I haven't looked to deep into them yet, just mainly wondering if I start implementing. Since paperless opens up a lot of personal information, a local Raspberry Pi might be more advisable then.

sean

HelenaGwyn Authentik doesn't seem to support a non-Docker install but you should be able to run Authelia. I've not tested this fully but the general steps would be:

Create a new Nginx Proxy Port app and assign it to a site. The site must have a SSL certificate assigned or use Let's Encrypt.
SSH to the app's shell user.
Download the latest binary release: wget https://github.com/authelia/authelia/releases/download/v4.37.5/authelia-v4.37.5-linux-amd64.tar.gz
Extract it: tar zxf authelia-v4.37.5-linux-amd64.tar.gz
Give it a better name: mv authelia-linux-amd64 authelia.
Create a config file in the shell user's home directory, setting the host as 127.0.0.1 and the port as your app's assigned port. I'm not certain but that might be the only change needed.
Run it: ./authelia --config ~/path/to/config.yml

I think at that point it should be up and running.

HelenaGwyn

sean I tried this but got the error ./authelia: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by ./authelia). Is there a workaround or is it waiting for servers with a new OS?

sean

HelenaGwyn when I run the commands I provided to you in my previous post exactly as shown there is no error.

Are you running the commands on your Opalstack server exactly as shown?

HelenaGwyn

sean Sorry, there was a new release with multi domain support and initially used that one which seems to use a newer GLIBC. Using the previous version did work indeed. Thank you!