I could never get mastodon to work with an app without using SSL.

I much prefer setting up a VPN and reverse proxy without having to deal with SSL. So it was really annoying not being able to use an app on the phone to connect to it.

We tried it and didn’t like the clunky UI.

We also tried Lemmy but it was a bit of a nuisance to maintain.

In the end we settled on a forum with a wiki.

We tried a few forums but in the end Flarum was the nicest, Just a bit of a pain to set the domain to be dynamic but it can be done with some PHP, alternatively, just use a reverse proxy with dnsmasq and wireguard pointing to that DNS.

As for a Wiki We have tried mediawiki, WikiJS And a couple others. I would recommend dokuwiki. (I hear good things about bookstack too).

How does it compare with Immich?

It is incredibly good. Cheese and chalk good. Using it with Aider really highlights how much the Dev space is about to change.

As others have said. I left photoprism for immich and it’s much better

So I use reverse proxies etc with my containers for others services

But KeePass with rsync is easier for passwords. I just use termux on my phone

I recommend using a docker container, they make the whole thing painless and easy.

I think the Linuxserver.io one is what I used from memory.

Yeah if this is for a small number of users, I would recommend wireguard or tailgate.

Port forwarding is asking for trouble.

Element is a complete disaster.

Like, completely unmaintained and broken.

Matrix works over i2P and Tor, just proxy the service.

P2P chat could include retroshare but it’s not really a solution due to a variety of ux issues.

I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve even seen vendors using it.

I know it’s E2EE and open source but there is a lot of Metadata.

What other limitations does it have?

Yeah I hear that, good point.

Arch has great documentation but also a bit more config.

I would vote for Fedora over debian though. Debian packages are so far out of date that it becomes a pain and copr works quite well.

If it’s just a server, Alpine and docker will do most things with good reliability and security.

Otherwise I’ve actually always used void and arch. While those aren’t typical choices for a server, it shows that it’s hard to go wrong.

Choose a distribution that appeals to you and it’ll work great.

For this use case, alpine sounds good.

See also Inkscape.

Doesn’t quite fit OPs want of self hosted, but still very good.

There is also Asymptote and tikz for more technical stuff.

Self hosting is your pathway to a tech background.

University for comp sci, in my experience around the space, is a complete waste of time. Just a piece of paper that may or may not equip the recipient with some skills that may or may not be relevant.

Vikings and org-mode.

Org-mode does not have an API but I’ve separated out multiple files and synced via git to moderate success with my gf. No API but maybe with gitea and orgize you could do something?

They both kind of suck in their own way.

If you want to things to run at startup and you’re not on systemd, rootless docker is probably easier.

Otherwise podman is mostly fine but be careful of native overlay if you’re not on BTRFS, this causes some pretty long build times.

I think I’ll keep doing it. It’s worked fine for the past decade 🤷

Why? I almost always have master/dev/stable.

Yeah I’ve been recommending Arch based did for a while. Personally I’m on void and Alpine, but as a first distro things like Cachy and Endeavour are unrivalled.