Self-hosting - a wish

Throughout the years I have used different solutions for hosting, email, social networking, etc. I have set up my own physical server with web and email servers, I have used Google Suite before it was a suite, I have used web hosting services with static sites, Wordpress, Joomla, and lately Gitlab Pages. I got burnt using a file storing service with a life time subscription, where I learned it was the life time of the service and not my life time that was intended. I have set up local storing, I went all-in with Dropbox and am now going all-out of most US services. Or at least trying to.

Which brings me to my latest experiment. I left Twitter some time ago for Mastodon. I have been wanting to move away from Facebook but have not found a good replacement and also, my friends and family are on Facebook and my own social network alternative without any other people wouldn’t make sense. But perhaps my sphere is ready for a move now?

I have been reading up on GoToSocial and Hubzilla. Maybe any of those are the solution for me? As I have a Raspberry Pi 4, only active as my IRC client, I could make it to better (or more) use. But I do struggle with my experience from before and the battle between using a centralized, managed-by-someone-else service or running my own where I have total control but also total responsibility for backups and security. I have not found the balance there yet. I posted a question on Mastodon to get some inspiration:

In the time of moving to federated services I’m curious about setting up my own #hubzilla or #gotosocial, having your own instance seems like a good idea these days. However, centralised services have (usually) more and better equipped people to take care of security than myself. So, how to weigh those against each other before sharing photos and personal thoughts to the world?

I got several replies and was intrigued by Yunohost which could be a middle ground solution. I could either run it in a VPS (cost though) or on my RPi (time). I tried to upgrade my old installation of Rasbian, but that kind of just broke everything. I figured a fresh installation of Yunohost for RPi would be a great fit. I did some more reading and while it one page said you needed an Ethernet connection, another page suggested you could set up WiFi connection once installed. Several attempts later I can conclude that an Ethernet connection is mandatory as you are otherwise stuck in the “Post installation” loop where it can not continue due to having to download the next part of the installation. I suppose the page about WiFi connection was referring to “once you have finished the complete installation using Ethernet” …

So, I went for installing a fresh Raspberry Pi OS instead. Now I’m contemplating whether to add Yunohost on top of that and GoToSocial inside Yunohost or go for the full on installation of Hubzilla directly. In the mean time I applied for a static IP address from my ISP. Let’s see what my next step will be!