alt Hacker NewsThat’s essentially what I’m trying to make widely available through my projects https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks and https://github.com/ibizaman/skarabox. Their shared goal is to make self-hosting more approachable to the masses.
It’s based on NixOS to provide as much as possible out of the box and declaratively: https, SSO, LDAP, backups, ZFS w/ snapshots, etc.
It’s a competitor to cloud hosting because it packages Vaultwarden and Nextcloud to store most of your data. It does provide more services than that though, home assistant for example.
It’s a competitor to YUNoHost but IMO better (or aims to be) because you can use the building blocks provided by SelfHostBlocks to self-host any packages you want. It’s more of a library than a framework.
It’s a competitor to NAS but better because everything is open source.
It still requires the user to be technical but I’m working on removing that caveat. One of my goals is to allow to install it on your hardware without needing nix or touching the command line.
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I love that you include hledger! It's amazing piece of software, even if a little obscure for people unfamiliar with plaintext accounting!
Love it! I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's crazy how many great FOSS alternatives are out there to everything – and while they might be relatively easy to install for tech-people ("docker compose up"), they are still out of reach for non-tech people.
Also, so many of these selfhostable apps are web applications with a db, server and frontend, but for a lot of use cases (at least for me personally) you just use it on one machine and don't even need a "hosted" version or any kind of sync to another device. A completely local desktop program would suffice. For example I do personal accounting once a month on my computer – no need to have a web app running 24/7 somewhere else. I want to turn on the program, do my work, and then turn it off. While I can achieve that easily as a developer, most of the people can't. There seems to be a huge misalignment (for lack of a better word) between the amount of high-quality selfhostable FOSS alternatives and the amount of people that can actually use them. I think we need more projects like yours, where the goal is to close that gap.
I will definitely try to use selfhostblocks for a few things and try to contribute, keep it up!