Seconded. Used their service for many years.

Not entirely the case. There are several companies that market primarily to business users that offer freebies to hobbyists -because those hobbyists sometimes eventually get to buy services for their employer.

Parquet is great, especially if there is some reasonable way of partitioning records - for example, by month or year - if you might need to only search 2024 or something like that. Parquet is great for only needing to I/O the specific variables you are concerned with, and if you can partition the records and only subset a fraction of them, operations can be extremely efficient.

Their brilliant idea was to combine the amazing Wireguard with all the ideas from the VOIP world for performant p2p connections of mobile devices. That gave them a head start but especially with headscale existing, anyone can replicate that. Now, their business depends on being the slickest option for managing authentication, users, devices, and ACLs for businesses. The writing is already on the wall for selfhosters - we don’t really need all those features.

Headscale already exists and the Tailscale clients are open source.

I use good old wallabag for read it later because of how well it works in fbreader on my Kobo. Linkwarden for the bookmarks. It’s not really bloated if you think about how the archiving preserves copies of bookmarks in case the site goes down, and more crucially, allows for full text search.

I wonder if there might be some super common spam tlds like .xyz or .ru or something, but generally, yeah, custom domain isn’t the issue. Some other options are Migadu, mailbox.org, mxroute, and Tuta all seem like decent companies. A lot of others “also do” email hosting, like porkbun and OVH. Plenty of companies host their email with all these companies and have mostly clear sailing without being spam binned.

Porkbun + runbox here. Domain and email together cost less than $30 a year. You can use the domain for free with GitHub pages or cloudflare for a free website too.

Other reason is the renew fees for special tlds are so unpredictable. Com is surprisingly cheap to renew.

That’s not an issue with a custom domain name, but one of the other parts you run into, SPF and DKIM dns settings being correct and the reputation of whatever SMTP server’s ip address is. No one spam-bins based just on random domain names, or every business would freak out. You can also use your own domain on Google, Microsoft, or Apples ecosystems, not that you need to, there are plenty of providers that will host your email. I like runbox.

Yeah, basically. It does bundle wireguard so that it can reverse proxy services over that. That’s probably what you were thinking of.

Pangolin Is a reverse proxy for TLS/https. Headscale is the self hosted Tailscale.

I have Tailscale (actually headscale) set up on all my devices and the performance is good enough I don’t turn it off when I’m home and on the same lan as my server. The connection is p2p so it’s just a little encryption overhead. When I travel to other networks like my mobile network, or various corp wifi networks, it continues to try to get a p2p connection. Only sometimes corporate wifi networks block p2p and the traffic round trips through my VPS. It does take a lot of load off the VPS compared to the old way with openVPN. It also continues to work “for a while” if the VPS is down.

Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.

If you are using wireguard from the VPS to your home server, it buys you nothing more. If you have mobile devices connecting directly to the home server, Tailscale will let them connect directly in most cases, which is nice.

I’m willing to recommend Tailscale because I run headscale and it does basically everything a selfhoster needs. When the free version is passable, it’s harder to enshitify the commercial version.

Wordtsar looks fun. I may try it out. I feel like converting to markdown and then using a plugin to push it into Wordpress is maybe just the precursor to going full-on static site generator ;)

I used phi3:mini-4k for tagging all my bookmarks and don’t think it was any worse than a big model for that kind of job. It will run on a 10 year old cpu and a few gb of ram. (note: ai tagging of bookmarks isn’t that great, regardless, but it helps with search).

Yeah, I don’t bother sorting and organizing old files/bookmarks/whatever. Automatic tagging and full-text search solve that need. I try to keep recent stuff organized nicely though.

And you can put a secure note in there that has all the instructions necessary for them to access anything they might need (either by taking that note to someone skilled enough to follow the instructions, or by making it dead simple enough for them to just extract everything to an empty external ntfs hard drive in a simple file hierarchy).