Ideas

Here’s a random, unsorted braindump of jumbled ideas for what I’d like this site to provide. I’m not necessarily advocating for any of these tools/sites/services (yet), just listing various things I’m aware of that could be useful.

What compute/services to use?

• Raspberry Pi (and equivalents)
  • And slimmer hardware (old Android phones)
  • And beefier hardware (workstations, actual rack hardware)
  • Resources like ServeTheHome
• Compute providers (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc)
• Full cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle/etc)
  • Should focus on free tiers, affordability, simplicity

Related question: How much compute does one need to run a bunch of services? Answer: usually not much.

What applications to run?

• Lists like awesome-selfhosted
• My personal examples (anylist, stronk (still need to open-source), etc)
• Ideas on how to figure out areas where software can help

How to modify popular and/or small software for one’s own use?

• Vetting open-source software
  • Star counts, forks, organization-backing, donors/supporters, recent activity, number of contributors, OSS vuln scanning, etc
• Making simple changes
  • Configuration changes, styling changes, using build tools, etc

How to do security in-depth?

• Using infrastructure like Tailscale/Headscale
• Using platforms like Sandstorm
• For hosting public applications from home, tradeoffs + how to tunnel traffic in?
  • E.g. with Cloudflare Tunnels, proxies like ngrok + frp, or directly with Tailscale
  • Dealing with firewalls
  • Understanding risks + ISP limitations
• Using tools like Caddy for auto-HTTPS