Going Self-Hosted

Since I realized how much the services I use every day track their users, I've always wanted to reduce my dependence on cloud services (at least somewhat) by self-hosting a bunch of services on my own servers, but I had never found any real reason to put in the work to do that: that changes today.

Bye bye, Google!

Together with a bunch of friends, I'm slowly starting to host my own little suite of cloud services under the *.nocturn9x.space domain. Our goal is to host many privacy-focused alternatives to popular services like Google Search, Google Mail, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Discord, and many others.

Currently, the following services are active:

  • Nitter -> An alternative Twitter frontend
  • Invidious -> An alternative YouTube frontend
  • Libreddit -> An alternative Reddit frontend
  • Whoogle -> A privacy-focused search engine alternative to Google search
  • Mailcow -> A fully fledged SMTP server and webmail client
  • Gitea -> A wonderful self-hosted alternative to GitHub
  • Nimforum -> An instance of nimforum, which will act as a mirror for this blog

We plan to add more services to the list like XMPP, Matrix Home Server, Mumble, DogBin, BitWarden, Bibliogram and many others that can't fit here for space reasons (turns out there is a lot of stuff to be self-hosted these days!).

Cool! How do I use them?

Currently only approved users can access the services (we have a Telegram group for that, you can contact me to join), but please do note that everything is in public beta right now: things are likely to break or change without warning as we iron out the kinks of running so many services on our own. If you are willing to help us set things up, we'd love to have you in our little crew! We especially need security experts to try and break into our server so we can make sure to patch potential security vulnerabilities

And that's all, folks!