Started thinking about some kind of roadmap for moving away from Big Tech and centralised online accounts as much as possible … the experiences of building my own fic archive and setting up my own fediverse instance this year have been so unexpectedly successful that I’m now determined to self-host (for various definitions of the term self-host) wherever I reasonably can. It costs more money – more than nothing, sure, for whichever free online services I’m trying to replace – but I’ve come to the (not hugely original) conclusion that if you’re using an online platform and not paying for it in financial terms, you’re probably paying in something else, most probably having your data sold to advertisers. That’s why I just renewed my Dreamwidth subscription, after all!
Having said that, I’m not especially bothered about Big Tech having my data – they have everyone else’s too, and it’s impossible to avoid in this day and age. What I’m more concerned about is being at the mercy of others’ content moderation policies. I’m not really trying to store or share any content that’s particularly objectionable, but I still don’t like the idea of Google or whoever being able to make sudden decisions that affect my files and being equally able to implement these decisions in the blink of an eye – or just, er, losing a load of data, no big deal. This is also the reason I didn’t want to join anyone’s fediverse server but my own (have I mentioned I love running my own fediverse server??).
I’ve used Gmail as a primary email provider since 2007 (back when addresses had to be @googlemail.com in the UK for some kind of legal reasons), but I’m thinking of switching to Fastmail for at least some purposes, not least because I’d be able to use my own domain name in the address and I just think that’s kind of cool, sorry. Likewise I’m considering moving from Google Drive to NextCloud, which I’d have to install on a VPS. From what I’ve seen, that ought to take care of files/syncing, but also of photos, notes, and location tracking. I currently pay £15 a year for the 100GB tier of Google Drive, but since moving all remotely work-related files to Institutional OneDrive, I haven’t needed anything like that much. (Although I’m well aware that hosting 10GB or so of files on a VPS and running NextCloud on it would already cost significantly more than £15 a year, ha. Sure, they all bill in USD, which isn’t real money anyway. [For legal reasons, this is … etc.])
Another service I want to move away from is GitHub; I’ve been using their static site hosting service for my professional website since like 2016 when I didn’t have any particular knowledge about or interest in web hosting, and using them for actual git repositories as intended since shortly after that. My website is badly in need of a revamp and I want to get away from the .github.io domain because a. it seems a bit unprofessional and b. the .io TLD appears to be actually a bit yikes. […]
I’m planning, at some point down the line, to get myself a second domain name and set up a new professional site via NearlyFreeSpeech, which I continue to find a very reasonable hosting service. As for actual git repositories, I had a look into smaller self-hostable git services and found Gitea, which I managed to set up on a NFS production site today. So I’ve moved my git repositories out of the jaws of Microsoft and into the ever-expanding praze.net multiverse. They’re now here! (Links in previous DW posts have been updated because I’m neurotically passionate about avoiding linkrot.)
I’m making a note of how I installed Gitea on NFS here, because as with all these things, there were a few odd errors that had to be circumvented. I found a tutorial for this but it was posted four years ago and deals with a much earlier version of Gitea; quite a few of the steps had to be changed. Here’s what I did:
git clone https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea cd gitea git checkout v1.19.4
v1.21.1 is the latest version; the docs didn’t say this, but it requires Node version 18, while I only have access to 16 on NFS. (This is one of the things that make installing stuff onto NFS servers a bit tricky at times – there’s no root access so you’re limited to the versions of utilities they provide. I guess I could have tried compiling Node 18 from source like an absolute mad lad, but that might well have caused more problems down the line. This is why I ended up setting up a VPS for Pleroma – doing it on NFS seemed impossible.) I tried v1.20.6 but make errored out before doing anything at all, so went back to v1.19.4 and that one worked.
Then:
TAGS="bindata sqlite sqlite_unlock_notify" make generate build
There were quite a few NPM warnings about things being deprecated while this went on – not surprising given the above.
Then:
mv gitea /home/protected/gitea cd .. rm -rf gitea cd /home/protected touch run-gitea.sh
The tutorial I was semi-following told me to echo a couple of lines into run-gitea.sh, but echo was giving me very bizarre errors – something to do with escaping, I think, but I couldn’t work out what needed to be escaped or how. So I just added the two lines using nano, viz.:
#!/bin/bash exec /home/protected/gitea
Then:
chmod a+x run-gitea.sh
The tutorial gave me the correct instructions for adding the daemon and proxy via the NFS control panel; there was no need to click start on the daemon, it just got going automatically. Then I completed the setup using the browser; /home/protected was already filled in in all the requisite places, although I had to select SQLite from the dropdown, which the tutorial didn’t highlight. I also ticked the box for “disable self-registration” because like my Pleroma instance, this is for nobody but me, me, me, and potentially ~lissajous (if he wants).
I got to the tls-setup.sh part of the tutorial and couldn’t get it to work; I looked around the NFS forums with little success until I eventually realised I should also be checking the Gitea forums, and there I found the answer (tl;dr: you need to set up an additional proxy). After that, everything worked fine. I remain amazed that I can just type some characters into this server in New York that I’m SSHed into and … things are created. Magic.
I have a small number of gists on GitHub and need to decide what to do with those, but I’m feeling pretty good about hosting my own git repositories in the first instance!