Foster Hangdaan

Don’t forget: entrepreneur, playboy, philanthropist.

From a time when websites used <table> or position: absolute; to place elements on the screen. That website is just one big table.

• Free Software Foundation
• GNU
• Richard Stallman’s Personal Blog
• Savannah

And pretty much the rest of the FSF and GNU websites.

I recommend Peer Calls as an alternative. Peer Calls uses peer-to-peer communication similar to Jami. You can check out Peer Calls on Github for more info.

So, in short, the things I really like about it:

• Simple to selfhost - Only one Docker container with no dependencies (database, storage, etc.) and you only need to forward HTTP/S traffic.
• Lightweight - You get voice and text chat; screen and file sharing. All of it directly P2P.
• Private - Selfhosting the signaling server will grant you control over the only step which requires a central server during the WebRTC connection process.
• No accounts - Just start using, no accounts are involved.

I’m in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I’d also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:

• Jami
• Peer Calls - can be selfhosted; you can try it out straight away using their flagship instance located here.

I wonder sometimes if the advice against pointing DNS records to your own residential IP amounts to a big scare. Like you say, if it’s just a static page served on an up to date and minimal web server, there’s less leverage for an attacker to abuse.

That advice is a bit old-fashioned in my opinion. There are many tools nowadays that will get you a very secure setup without much effort:

• Using a reverse proxy with automatic SSL certs like Caddy.
• Sandboxing services with Podman.
• Mitigating DoS attacks by using a WAF such as Bunkerweb.

And of course, besides all these tools, the simplest way of securing public services is to keep them updated.

I’ve found that ISPs too often block port 80 and 443. Did you luck out with a decent one?

Rogers has been my ISP for several years and have no issue receiving HTTP/S traffic. The only issue, like with most providers, is that they block port 25 (SMTP). It’s the only thing keeping me from self-hosting my own email server and have to rely on a VPS.

I self-host everything from my home network including my website. I like to keep all my data local. 😁

It’s a simple setup: just a static site made with Lume, and served with Caddy. The attack surface is pretty small since it’s just HTML and CSS files (no JavaScript).

First of all, doesn’t Navidrome have authentication? So, I don’t see why exposing it to the public is a problem.

Second, some reverse proxies support basic auth. This way, you can password-protect some services and is useful if the service does not have its own authentication. Here as an example snippet for Caddy:

example.com {
	basic_auth {
		# Username "Bob", password "hiccup"
		Bob $2a$14$Zkx19XLiW6VYouLHR5NmfOFU0z2GTNmpkT/5qqR7hx4IjWJPDhjvG
	}
	reverse_proxy myservice:8000
}

You’ll have to look up the docs for other reverse proxies.

That would be nice but what other alternatives are there? It’s either Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, or clones of these browsers.

If you need S3-compliant storage for testing and development, you can use an S3 mock server. I’ve tried the following for use in web development and CI environments, they are lightweight and configurable:

• Adobe S3Mock
• s3ninja

There is also Localstack. I found this one to be a bit more complex than the ones above and ended up not sticking with it.