About one year ago, I made plans to ditch many of the proprietary services that I used on a daily basis and replace them with FOSS alternatives. Now it is a year later and while my project is not done, I really did quite a lot.
History
But why do all this?
The answer consists of three main points, though they are weighed differently:
- Privacy: The inspiration for this project came from the fact that I did not trust my messaging application back then. It was proprietary and probably collecting all the data it could, thus I wanted to get away from it.
- Learning: I really enjoy tinkering with computer hardware, software and am quite interested in server administration. Hence, I thought it would be a greate learning opportunity for me.
- Fun: I do enjoy this kind of work, so I thought it would be a fun, but quite major, side project.
I knew that it would be a major undertaking but I still wanted to give it a try.
Instant Messaging
Judging by the amount of personal data I leak when texting people I know I wanted to switch IM services as quickly as possible.
At this stage, there were three candidates for me:
- Signal
- Matrix with Riot
- Jabber/XMPP
Originally, Signal was my preferred choice since I really liked its interface. But the problem with Signal, and I do not blame the developers for this one, is that the service only works with a mobile device running the app. If I wanted to run Signal on my computer because, for example, my phone is broken or the battery is empty, then I just could not since it requires my phone to be online. Also, which I learned only just recently, Signal's Android app has a bug which drains the phone's battery when one does not have Google services installed on their phone.
Matrix in combination with Riot was another idea of mine. But here the problem was the mobile app. It seemed to me more like the interface of messengers like Slack and Discord, which I personally do not like for mobile Instant Messaging. When I last looked at the entire Matrix ecosystem, there was only one well-working client for mobile, which was Riot. Additionally, the homeserver was difficult to set up; at least much more than Prosody, to which I will come in the next paragraph. Moreover, I read in the the Disroot blog that they have quite some problems with their Matrix homeserver as "[...] [k]eeping room history and all metadata connected to them forever is a terrible idea, in our opinion, and not sustainable at all. One year of history is way too much already [...]". This was the end for the idea of self-hosting a Matrix server.
Jabber/XMPP being something I saw only once way back when browsing a linux forum, I became interested. It checked all my requirements: It is cross-platform, as it is only a protocol, allows self-hosting with FOSS software and, the most important factor, includes End-to-End-Encryption using OMEMO. I also started to appreciate federated software solutions, which made Jabber the clear winner for me. Tehe Jabber clients that I now use on a daily basis are also very fine pieces of opensource software: Conversations' interface is simple, works without draining my battery and it just works. Gajim, after some configuration and tweaking, works really well, looks clean and simple and I would really love to replace Discord on the desktop with Gajim.
Recently, I also started to use Profanity, which seems a bit rough around the edges and sometimes does not work, but maybe I am just doing something wrong.
In terms of server software I initially wanted to go with ejabberd. But after seeing its amount of documentation, I just chose Prosody. It is the software that was the least painful to set up with all requirements for modern messaging being covered by it internal or external modules. It also never crashed; only when I messed the configuration up with syntax errors.
Since I use Discord and it is more difficult to bring people over from there, I went with a compromise and started to bridge the channels I use the most to a Jabber MUC using matterbridge. Thus I can use those channels without having to have the Discord app installed on my devices.
Another use I got out of Jabber is the fact that I can create as many bot accounts on my server as I want. While this sounds like I use those bots for bad things it is the opposite: I use them to tell me when something is wrong using netdata or for the already mentioned bridge between Discord and Jabber.
VoIP
VoIP is something that I use even more than plain Instant Messaging, which is why I wanted to self-host a FOSS VoIP-solution. The most commonly used one is Mumble, which was a run-and-forget experience. Especially when not using the full server but a smaller one like umurmur.
Code
At first, I used Github. But after Microsoft bought it, I was a bit sceptical and switched to Gitlab, which worked really well. It was even opensource so I started using it. But after some time, I found that there are some things that annoy me with Gitlab. This includes it automatically enabling "Pipelines" when I just created a repository even though I never enabled those.
That was when I came across gogs and gitea; the latter being my current solution. I wanted a simple software that I can just run and has a somewhat nice interface. Why the nice interface? I want that if people look at my code that it feels familiar to browse it in the browser. Also, I can invite friends to use it if they also want to get away from proprietary services and software.
My instance has registrations disabled as I do not have the time to moderate it, but I have seen that federation of some sorts, in the context of ForgeFed, is being discussed on the issue tracker, though you should not quote me on this one.
Gitea was mostly a run-and-forget experience for me and is working very well.
Personal Information Management
Since I've started to use calendars more, I wanted a solution to sync those across my devices. Before this entire project I was using Google's own calendar service. Then I started using Disroot's NextCloud to synchronize calendar data. However, it not being encrypted at rest was a concern for me as my calendar does contain some events that I would not like an attacker to know as this would put the attacker in a position where sensitve information can be deduced about me.
After some looking around, I found EteSync. This software works really great, given that the server is just a simple django app that stores data and does user management and authentication. The Android app, in my case, does most of the work and works really well. The only problem I had was the fact that EteSync has no desktop client. They provide a web app and a server that bridges between regular DAV and EteSync but nothing like a regular client.
Since I used regular WebDAV services, like the Disroot one I mentioned earlier, I have vdirsyncer installed and configured only to find out that they dropper support for EteSync in the last version. Wanting a tool like vdirsyncer but for EteSync I went to work and created etesyncer.
Most of my online life I used proprietary EMail-services. Most of that time I used GMail. Since I bought a domain for this project and have a server running, I thought: "Why not self-host EMail?". This is exactly what I did!
I use the "traditional" combination of postfix and dovecot to handle incoming, outgoing EMail and IMAP access. Since I use mu4e in combination with msmtp and mbsync for working with email, I did not install a webmail client.
This was the most difficult part to get working as the configuration sometimes worked and sometimes not. The main culprit here was DKIM because it changed the permissions of its files at startup to something else which made openDKIM crash. Now it stopped doing this but I am not sure why. What made the EMail-server so difficult was also the fact that so much goes into hosting an EMail-server I never thought about, like DKIM, SPF or having a FQDN.
At this point, it pretty much runs itself. It works, it receives EMails, it sends EMails and it allows me to view my EMails via IMAP.
Coming from Protonmail, the only thing that I am missing is encryption of my EMails. Since not every person I contact using EMail uses or knows PGP, I would like to encrypt incoming EMails. While there are solutions to do this, they all involve encrypting the EMail after they are put in the queue by postfix, which puts them on disk. Hence, the mail was once written in plaintext. While I would like to avoid this, I have not found a way of doing this without digging into postfix's code and adding support for this.
Blog
I wanted a blog for a long time and since I had a spare domain lying around, I decided to create one. While I could have gone with a solution like Wordpress and the like, they were too complicated for my needs. So I just went with the simplest solution which is using a static site generator: jekyll in my case.
This is one of the points where decentralization was a huge factor directly from the start, as this is exactly what the web was made for, so I was actively avoiding any non-selfhost solutions. While I could have gone with a federated solution like write freely, I chose the staic page generator as it was much simpler. And because I love writing in Markdown.
Webserver
Since I now use GPG to sign any emails that I send, I needed a way of exposing these keys to the public. While I could have gone with a keyserver, I decided against it. Admittedly, I did not look into self-hosting a keyserver but this was not my plan. I want to keep everything simple and prevent myself from installing too many services on my server. This led me to just putting my public keys on the server and pointing my webserver to them.
Since I run multiple services that are accessible via the browser, I needed the webserver as a reverse proxy, pointing my different domain names to the correct services. This way, all services can run on their own ports while the reverse proxy "unifies" them on port 443.
Conclusion
All in all I am very happy with my setup. It allows me to host my own instances privacy-respecting software the way I like to. It gives me something to do and allows me to learn about system administration and different tools like Docker or Ansible. So all in all, although the project has no real end, I would say that it was and is a huge success for me.
During the course of this project, I also switched services like my search engine or the software with which I watch videos but as I do not self-host these, I did not mention them.