Hi everybody, I wrote this piece and it might seem a little half-baked, but I’ll never get it going if I don’t throw it out there.
Let me know what you think, thanks and selfhosting ftw.
Great idea, i really hope we see more of that type of local/selfhosting for average folks, its really the only way to save the internet from just being another corporate censorship heavy advertising platform.
As a non technical person, I think any tool that would make local hosting easier for laypeople like myself is great! I hope everything works out for you and localhostinger becomes a thing. I particularly like the “The app store idea” version a lot!
I buy it.
As it turns out, a couple of months ago when a laptop crapped out at an inopportune time, I needed to retreat to a much older machine with barely enough memory to keep a browser running all day. As I tried to work out a recovery plan for the things that didn’t seem properly backed up (they were, just not where I expected them), I remembered that I had a couple of old Raspberry Pi units that I never did much with, and decided that could take the load off of the laptop if I tossed them in the corner.
So far, I have Code Server to substitute for Visual Studio Code, Cryptpad for Libre Office, Forgejo just because I really should have done that a long time ago, Fresh RSS for a rotating list of RSS readers since I dropped my Internet-accessible Tiny Tiny RSS installation, Inf Cloud and Radicale for a calendar/address book, Jellyfin that used to run on the then-in-use old laptop, Snappy Mail for Thunderbird and the bunch of heavy webpages from mail providers, YaCy because I’ve wanted to use it more for many years, and a few others.
Moving onto a more functional computer, I decided to keep the servers running, because the setup works about as well as the desktop setups that I’ve run for years, if I use a few pinned tabs. I’m sure that I’ll scream about it when something goes wrong, but it does the job…
There are a few apps that I think fit this use case really well.
Languagetool is a spelling and grammer checker that has a server client model. Libreoffice now has built in languagetool integration, where it can acess a server of your choosing. I make it access the server I run locally, since archlinux packages languagetool.
Another is stirling-pdf. This is a really good pdf manipulation program that people like, that comes as a server with a web interface.
Thanks, I’ll check languagetool. stirling pdf already has a desktop client, although I don’t know if it offers the same functionality (but I would expect it).
Maybe you should join forces with YuNoHost. It let peoples selfhost on a Raspberry Pi or any old computer. Can be a “when I start it spare board only visible at home”.
They already have a lot of apps packages that are 1 click to install. Maybe you can discuss to propose an option in their package script to reduce network to the current machine?
The only downside to this approach is that their solution is targeted at being an entire OS. So I suspect most of the work would be to extract the app management from the rest?
One issue I have with your idea is that most open source servers/app are designed to be run on Linux right? Not every users use it on their main machine. You also talk a lot about docker… does it work on Windows? I mean WSL sounds like a nightmare to manage with script, for other peoples. From my point of view, YuNoHost solution is easy enough for a layman, and they will be happy not to break their main PC, have access from their phone, … even if only at home.
Thanks a lot for bringing yunohost up, this looks very very interesting. I will bring it up there.
When it comes to docker, I think at least Mac would be close to Linux (at least from my experience in my previous job – there are some integration issues, but managable I think). Windows I have no idea to be honest, could be a nightmare. For me the benefits of docker seem to be: isolation from the rest of the machine, and that pretty much every selfhostable app has a docker compose file.
