I think if you compare the core functionality of Synology and NC then you’re right - one is a NAS the other is a file syncing application. However, both have apps that overlap in their feature set - contacts & calendar, file syncing, online document editing, email etc. These are the kind of tools people tend to use on their home server.

When comparing the overlapping features, Synology comes our way in front. Honestly, I don’t understand how NC is so popular.

I’m fairly sure it’s predominantly closed source.

Synology are proprietary, but I think the underlying OS is based on Open BSD.

That’s a great point actually - I’d rather use a first class backup solution than a half baked one.

Nextcloud the company only focuses on some of those apps, and the “Official” label in the app store doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is involved in developing that app. It can be confusing to figure this out though, especially because a lot of people from the company still support and help out with the community-developed apps even though they aren’t necessarily the company’s priority.

Because the h-card is there for the IndieWeb to parse. As I said in the post, the purpose for me personally writing it this way, is so there is a simple block of code for me to edit that acts as my profile. Everything within this profile can be found elsewhere in my site. It’s just a simple way for me to update it for IW purposes.

So by that rationale, is your mobile phone broken? Or your laptop/desktop? All these devices (especially Windows) aren’t private out of the box, and their workflow isn’t optimised for you specifically either.

You need to harden these devices by installing AV, the apps you use, disabling intrusive services, like Cortana/Siri & telemetry.

Just because some work is needed up front to get something working how you need/want it to work, doesn’t mean it’s broken. It just means they’re configured to have wide appeal. I don’t recall people claiming their laptop, desktop and/or mobile phones’ are intrinsically broken though…

Configuration is one thing. Actually getting email delivered is another. I feel like you’re instantly on Google’s and Microsoft’s blacklist with your little server, marking all your messages as spam. It’s horrendous!

I don’t think this is related to the article’s content.

I’m not sure I agree. Services like Mail in a Box and Mailcow make getting started a little simpler. Overall it is complicated, but email is a complicated system. Being complicated doesn’t mean it’s broken though.

Which part is the most painful?

I understand that email hosting used to be appalling and most of it still is but OpenSMTPD is actually really nice to use. I’ve chosen to write email apps over webapps for a couple things, e.g. self hosted instagram where I email photos from my phone to myself.

Just need OpenIMAP and OpenSpam and Open Everything Else and we are all good.

It’s really not that hard.

Great question! I think as long as you’re sensible, the privacy and InfoSec risks are low. For example, I would never put my location out there as my address, it just says “North West England” which I think is vague enough to not be a privacy concern.

The social profile links are all public anyway, so no issues there; and the email address that I publish is different than the personal email address that my friends, family, tax office, government etc have.

WRT WordPress and spamming, Webmentions come through as WordPress comments, so you can plug them into Akismet to filter out spam. The Webmention plugin also has a mechanism by which you can whitelist certain domains. So you can automatically allow Webmentions from certain sites, then edit this list as you go. There’s a little work at first, but once you have it setup and tuned, there’s little to do in terms of managing spam.

As I understand it, it’s a grassroots effort to enable tooling etc. to get the benefits of social networks and the like without the centralisation.

It is pretty much in the “toys for geeks” stage at the moment, if it will ever leave it depends on adoption and wether said tooling emerges. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem right now.

It feels like the modern equivalent of webrings plus the federated, OSS equivalent of Disqus.

I might be way off base here, but RDF was a big part of the push for “Web 2.0” - which I see as the spiritual precursor to today’s IndieWeb. The problem was that the entire process bogged down into standards wankery. It doesn’t help that RDF is pretty damn weird, and the proponents didn’t do a great job explaining why the overheard was required.

I think microformats (which are basically HTML+CSS classes) is a reaction to that overcomplication.

I’m not actually sure what the rationale was for landing on Microformats.

As far as I know, it’s only Microformats that have been adopted within the Indieweb. I don’t recall reading anything about other platforms within their documentation.

I came to say the same thing. I back up Nextcloud by doing a ZFS snapshot then ZFS send to a remote machine. I’ve had the VM running it fail entirely and I was able to completely restore everything.

But no restore procedure in this tutorial.

There’s a red banner saying “TEST YOUR BACKUPS” followed by instructions on how to restore.

Zfs snapshots are atomic.

What does that actually give you, given how in Unix file systems have no concept of a transaction? What benefits do ZFS snapshots have then regarding consistency?

Let’s say that I run a program which adds a user to the system. This program will have to update /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and create a directory in /home. Do ZFS snapshots protect you from taking a snapshot of your file system when you’re in the middle of those operations (as in let’s say you modified /etc/passwd and /etc/group, but didn’t modify /etc/shadow and didn’t create a directory in /home yet)?

Of the few users for whom this might be an issue, I’d imagine most are quite capable of overriding the stylesheet.

I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of users have never set a font preference in their browser. I certainly never have, and I don’t know anyone who has.

I really don’t like the whole “must hate left handed people” and “do left-handed people not matter to you?” angle

Even worse since the blog author does not actually have an answer. The post does not provide any additional information to answer that claim beyond the headline.

I’ve added some context to the post, as you’re right I wasn’t very clear. My issue is that it’s impossible to get a left handed ergo mouse from Logitech - trackerball or not. Right handed people get so much choice, but we’re left with the billy basic symmetrical mice for most of the time.

The title is also supposed to be facetious; I’m well aware that Logitech don’t hate left handed people. I thought that would have been obvious, clearly not though, so again I’ve added some context at the end of the post.

Thanks for the feedback. :-)

Thanks, hadn’t noticed that - I’ve fixed it.

And in case you decide to go with a static site, Netlify has an extremely generic free tier which would waive off those 3€ per month as well.

Supporting your point, I have a non-optimized, web app written in Python with plain HTML and CGI serving people daily at under 30% utilization of a $5 VM. Static, cached website offloading to a CDN might be even cheaper.

You can get a VPS for free (and domain as well), check out: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/free-small-matrix-server#get-a-free-server (yes, I wrote that page).

Good point.

You can do things even cheaper if you use plain html/css files. I paid $37 on nearlyfreespeech, but I could’ve shaved off another ~$15 if I only had one site instead of two.

Bandwidth has never been a concern, but if it is, Cloudflare has a free plan.

With HTML and CSS knowledge one can just set up a static site.

Of course it’s not as convenient as logging into a CMS but unless you have loads of traffic it will be free, most likely forever.

Depending on how important it is for people to self-host, one might reconsider and use services like neocities, SDF or one of the many friendly tilde communities. True, you don’t get to decide that much, but you can still learn a lot under constraints, that you can then apply if you reconsider again later on and “self-host” (though that’s not always the right term with VPS’s).

I can’t help if but feel that everything SEO nowadays is a whole bunch of smoke.

Search engines are incredibly smart in detecting and ignoring specific SEO techniques. Genuine, relevant organic content is still the best SEO you can do.

I don’t do any SEO, and there’s no requirement to do it for a personal blog. Still, if the added name recognition gets him an additional .1% in salary or lets him shorten a job search by one day, it will pay for itself.

Yeah, it’s not cheap that for sure. But it’s the plugin I get the most use from. Not only for SEO, but writing assessments too.

Agree completely.

But I don’t want a static site. I use Wordpress and am very happy with it. It’s all about personal choice. :)

ClouDNS packages have DDoS protection.

Is anyone still using CRT? :-)

It does. I’ve been going through a site re-design, which I finished this morning. prefers-dark-mode was re-implemented today.