TL;DR - use Signal.
Re: self-hosting – go for it! The DIY route is an excellent learning experience, so this is the way to go if you want your own privacy-friendly chat service. There’s quite a lot to achieving “privacy” and “security” though (heck, even defining these is challenging)… have you self-hosted before? How important are service quality / speed / reliability, backups, mobile + desktop? Will the folks you want to chat with use/like it too?
Re: Signal – definitely check out this app as well. They (the Signal Foundation) take privacy very seriously. Messages are only stored on devices running Signal, and they are ephemeral by default. Actually, that’s a good thing to consider: How important are durable / offline archives of your chats, useful with other tools (like grep?). Signal makes offline archiving difficult by design (for the sake of security/privacy).
Note that Signal is technically self-hostable, but I gather this is very difficult.
I self-host Nextcloud and I use Talk. I don’t love it, but I do find it useful for some things. Flipping on Nextcloud is pretty easy, but it is challenging to make it secure, reliable, fast, etc. And you still have to convince others to use it.
Nice. That’s similar to what I’m doing: Ubuntu LTS server running containers, orchestrated by Docker Compose, with a Traefik reverse proxy in front of everything. I’m curious about TrueNAS SCALE though, wondering if that would suit my needs.
I’m a Jellyfin fan, personally. Do you have something self-hosted you like for streaming media?
I appreciate your thought process here! Where did you end up as far as self-hosting?
I think “VPS” in Christian’s blog post does refer to shared hosting.
Fans of timelineize might also like https://activitywatch.net . (I didn’t, but YMMV)
There’s one in Seattle called the Home Internet Server group. It is run by Steve Herber and is I think loosely tied with KEGS and BELUG.
Dave presented his walkthrough of my book yesterday at BELUG.
this isn’t a “phone home”
are you sure? I’m not. In truth, only they know. Here’s the code I worked around in my fork. Why does it fetch an external image? They could just include it in the repo. Why is it fetched from docuseal.co? I would guess GitHub renders badges like this too.
Blocking the DNS of the GitHub host
Sure, but why not default to privacy in the upstream source? Why make users and self-hosters do extra work? Feels more like a penalty for non-Enterprise users than a benefit for paying up: you’ll either pay with money or your data.
Also note: it is actually docuseal.co that would be blocked (I incorrectly guessed it pulled the image directly from GitHub), so that’s probably not as big of a deal than blocking, say, GitHub for a LAN with multiple tech-savvy users.
they were very clear about it
I disagree. I’ll grant you they made a clear decision (and quickly), but didn’t explain further. Frankly I found their replies a bit confusing; they implied the issue as entirely about OEM/white-labeling and avoided the tracking/phone home question. They should just clarify why the badge actually exists when the question came up the second time.
Maintaining a fork is an insane amount of work
Agreed that maintaining a fork is work. But, I mean, check mine out, please. It’s 3 lines, and could probably be reduced to a few characters. I’d still love to avoid the fork because your other reasons are quite valid, especially about trust. That’s what this is really about, to be honest. I don’t trust this isn’t a phone home, and I don’t want to have to trust them on this.
I’m not going to worry about doing that every time a release is missed by you
100% agreed.
they have a pro version, so aren’t removing the customizations that exist
I don’t understand. Will you explain what you mean here?
It’s part of a lot of open source projects.
If you mean badges on GitHub repo home pages then yes, I agree.
If you mean mandatory phoning home or, really, reaching out for any images/static assets from a self-hosted service, I disagree.
Here’s the right way to do it (again, assuming this is a phone home): be 100% transparent that/if it is a phone home, have a privacy policy around data collected, and make it disabled by default. Traefik does this, for example. They have a phone home toggle called TRAEFIK_GLOBAL_SENDANONYMOUSUSAGE that defaults to false. Note the especially privacy-concerned (and perhaps less upgradae-concerned?) may wish to disable TRAEFIK_GLOBAL_CHECKNEWVERSION as well.
it’s of no security concern, freal
I never claimed it was. Maybe my fork will have security improvements as well someday, but right now it just has this one tiny patch. And again, I agree with your other points about forks: best case is this fork becomes unnecessary (as transparency around the badge increases).
Hi! Author here. I added a http → https redirect to my book website, thanks all. I do intend to always serve public content via https to (as other smart folks have thoughtfully mentioned) guard against stuff getting messed with between my server and your browser (however unlikely that may be). In this case I thought my server was redirecting to https, but turns out my Firefox was forcing https (again, same as other smart folks said).
re: “expert”, ugh, I’m embarrassed to even use that word, but someone else graciously called me that (so I intended to remove “self-proclaimed”), and it supposedly helps for sales. All I know is I’m growing and learning just like you, the more I know the less I know I know, and I make mistakes all the time. I always appreciate kind corrections/feedback/comments/patches/suggestions/etc.
That includes feedback on https://github.com/meonkeys/shb/blob/main/pelican/website/content/extra/.htaccess … I feel clever fixing two things in a single redirect (getting rid of www. and forcing https), but I’m not sure if I’m doing something silly or dangerous here. I’m definitely not an expert at Apache mod_rewrite, I just cobbled that together from official docs and stackoverflow posts.
Yep! RSS feeds for that: