Self hosting is not all that bad. If you are willing to do a bit of work you can actually get decent results at a fraction of the cost.

I am in the process of moving my stuff from Google to selfhosted alternatives. Google Photos => Immich, Google Drive => probably Next Cloud or some better alternative.

I am also looking into how to selfhost my email (and yes I know, the horror of inboxing from self hosting. But I am at the point of not only willing to give it a tr, but actively saying "fuck you" to everybody that does not receive my email, because they are on Outlook or O365 (or Google, bt inboxing into Google is easier imho).

Especially with my paid Google now daily having spam in my inbox, while valid emails are so often in spam, that I have to check spam at least once per week.

Don't self host email. Checkout purelymail or a similar alternative

Self hosting email is a nightmare and can bite you in the ass big time.

As another commenter noted, it's really not so bad, just don't self-host /sending/ email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433228

Self-hosting receiving emails isn't too bad. And you can still control sending too as a relay to the actual sender.

As someone who self hosts many services, I would encourage you to switch to self hosted email last. Even though self hosting has been made much easier thanks to really incredible FOSS tools, you are going to have random learning pains, some delayed by a few months, and it would really suck to lose email for even the shortest durations. The others are easy to live without while you debug during the learning process.

Btw immich is incredible. I recommend Nextcloud AIO instead of raw Nextcloud. Absolutely great tools

I’m looking to set up immich on my server. How do you back up your media? If you get hit by a bus how do you leave instructions and mechanisms to your family to restore the backup? My wife won’t move off of iCloud until I have a great answer for those.

One idea is to attach a USB hard drive and set a nightly job to rsync the Immich folders there. Worst case, if no one's willing to rebuild Immich, they just detach the hard drive, attach to any computer, and copy/paste the whole folder onto iCloud or GDrive. Probably best to format the USB hard drive as FAT32 so that any computer can read it.

I use Restic + Rclone to create an encrypted snapshot to Google Drive. It's easier if you pick an S3 compatible storage though.

That way Google has no ability to read the data and it's only a just in case backup if my NAS goes up in flames.

You could write down a document on exactly how to pull the data off the backup.

I use Mega. They have the cheapest per TB S3 compatible service I can find, and they've actually been very reliable. I use Kopia to perform (and encrypt) the backups, so they never get anything other than the raw data and it's all done on a schedule.

I think I paid $300/year for 20TB, so it's not free, but it's offsite, well encrypted, and I'm pretty sure it will still be there if I need it next week.

I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.

This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.

I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.

My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:

    action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
    match from auth for any action "process_dkim"

A local DKIM process then processes and sends back to OpenSMTPD:

    listen    127.0.0.1:10027
    relay     127.0.0.1:10028
    [...] DKIM signing config [...]

Then back to OpenSMTPD to forward to the final email sender:

    listen on lo   port 10028 tag DKIM
    action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
    match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"

I'm not sure if I even need to sign with DKIM as my email sender does the final DKIM signing, but it seems that in the email world, it's always best to do things as "properly" as possible whenever you can.

I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.

I've spent the last decade building a Dropbox alternative that works on top of any storage protocol (SFTP, S3, SMB, IFS, GIT WebDAV, local disk, and literally everything else [1]) and its on github [2]

[1] https://www.filestash.app/docs/plugin/#storage

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

There are still no feasible alternatives to Google Drive that make sharing content with others with minimal hoops easy.

NextCloud isn't too bad

These days I just don't trust Nextcloud exposed to the public internet. You basically need to be a full time dev ops / security engineer to keep on top of things like PHP2Shell fast enough.

My setup is Nextcloud behind tailscale and if I need to share something I just put it on google drive temporarily.

With a reverse proxy, your only public endpoint is port 443 and nginx or whatever webserver you choose. Sure, the web server might also have zero days but the attack surface is relatively small.

Which was enough exposure to get a shell on your server via the recent php exploit. If you run a public facing nextcloud server you need to be ready to update at least within an hour of patches releasing.

NextCloud AIO runs in Docker containers. Is there a known exploit for PHP2Shell from within Docker?

NextCloud AIO runs in Docker containers, so it'd be a jump to break out of that, but, yes, they could exfiltrate your data.

I guess it's choose your poison. What are?

P(companies&governments spying on you)

P(hacker stealing your files)

The impacts of the latter are probably more dangerous but unless you're a juicy target, I'd imagine most hackers are going to go for rich grandmas (sadly). So my gut feelings are ~0.95 and ~0.01, respectively.

For me I don't share that many files with others and the ones I do share are usually less confidential than the rest. So I run Nextcloud behind tailscale and put just the share files on google drive.

I might eventually look in to an automatic updates setup for nextcloud to keep up on patches faster than I could do it manually.

These days it is really a breeze. Email, Drive clone and everything. Just need to invest bit a for hardware.

If only hardware wasn't crazy expensive :/

But it isn't - not for doing stuff like self-hosting files? It's actually incredibly cheap, most people probably have a commodity PC lying around and can shove a few cheap HDDs into it and RAID stripe it if they're ambitious... or just full mirror their files if they aren't. And if you're really scared of loss find some host provider and rent a cheapo instance somewhere geographically far from you to park a mirror of the data.

Proton has Mail, Drive, and a LLM web chat, they all work pretty well for me.

I've been a proponent of theirs for years, and I'm still a user. However, their CEO's recent behavior and the public backlash have got me really nervous that there might be a major breach, and that if there is they'll handle it poorly. Failing that I wonder if the company can stay viable with a leader like that.

Vibe coding is one thing, but calling employees losers for caring about quality.. It sounds like he forgot why people use proton.

It's really not though. It has become 1 click to install a self hosted google photos/drive. We just need people to be more aware of the alternatives