I run mbsync/isync to keep a maildir copy of my email (hosted by someone else).

You can run it periodically with cron or systemd timers, it connects to an IMAP server, downloads all emails to a directory (in maildir format) for backup. You can also use this to migrate to another IMAP server.

If the webmail sucks, I wouldn't run my own. I would consider using Thunderbird. It is a desktop/Android application. It syncs mail to your desktop/phone, so most of the time, it's working with local storage so it's much faster than most webmails.

https://charity.wtf/2021/08/09/notes-on-the-perfidy-of-dashboards/

Graphs and stuff might be useful for doing capacity planning or observing some trends, but most likely you don't need either.

If you want to know when something is down (and you might not need to know), set up alerts. (And do it well, you should only receive "actionable" alerts. And after setting alerts, you should work on reducing how many actionable things you have to do.)

(I did set up Nagios to send graphs to Clickhouse, plotted by Grafana. But mostly because I wanted to learn a few things and... I was curious about network latencies and wanted to plan storage a bit long term. But I could live perfectly without those.)

I think having a solid/stable virtualization layer is very helpful. Whether that's Proxmox, Incus, or something else, it's a matter of taste.

You can then put NixOS, Guix, Debian, Arch, whatever on top.

That's what I use too. Coupled with soju it's an easier experience for me. And they are both in Debian 13!

WebTorrent Desktop is a bit abandoned, but last time I tried it, it still worked despite some warts (I think it wouldn't work with newer Chromecasts).

My notes also have:

• https://github.com/asapach/peerflix-server
• https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay
• https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent?tab=readme-ov-file#downstream-projects (This library is good at streaming, software using it should too)

Not sure about how it handles video, but I've been meaning to take a look at https://getbananas.net/

Reminder that you can go for hybrid approaches; receive email and host IMAP/webmail yourself, and send emails through someone like AWS. I am not saying you can't do SMTP yourself, but if you want to just dip your toes, it's an option.

You get many of the advantages; you control your email addresses, you store all of the email and control backups, etc.

...

And another thing: you could also play with https://chatmail.at/relays ; which is pretty cool. I had read about Delta Chat, but decided to play with it recently and... it's blown my mind.

https://dgross.ca/blog/linux-home-server-auto-sleep did the rounds lately.

But you'll need another system to always be on to handle this.

In many cases, you can "fake" this in other means. For example, I had Remmina configured to run a script to send a WOL packet and wait before connecting via remote desktop to a computer.

What volume of data you are discussing? How many physical nodes? Can you give a complete usage example of what you want to achieve?

In general, there's a steep change in making things distributed properly, and distributed systems are often designed for big and complex situations, so they "can afford" being big and complex too.

I discovered Open Food Facts very recently. I was supersurprised because the mobile app is very neat, and I didn't expect there would be so many products (edit: in Spain). I've sent two contributions so far.

Also, you can download their database. If I had some time, I'd try to run some queries on it. (I'm on a low sodium diet and sometimes you find the most unexpected products with little salt, but it's time consuming.)

edit: also, I forgot, the app is on F-Droid, another nice touch.

I keep everything documented, along with my infrastructure as code stuff. Briefly:

• Nextcloud
• Vaultwarden
• Miniflux
• My blog
• Takahe (a multi-domain) ActivityPub server
• My health tracker CRUD data entry
• https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/
• Grafana (for health stats and monitoring data from Nagios)
• Nagios
• FreeIPA/Ipsilon (SSO)

edit: plus a few things that do not have a web UI.

I did some testing with it, because I believe more people should be able to self-host.

I like how it is implemented. It has good support for email. Many apps support SSO.

The critical part to me is how up-to-date applications are. I started a small project to automate version tracking, check out:

https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/app/nextcloud.html

; so for example, the YunoHost Nextcloud app does not lag much behind upstream. My intention with this is to let people see that they have been updating Nextcloud dilligently for two years; they might pull the plug tomorrow, but it's a good track record.

(I'd like to add scrapers to other projects similar to YunoHost. My ultimate goal would be to be able to choose a list of apps you'd like to self-host, and see which projects like YunoHost carry the applications you want, and compare how they track updates.)