Setup https://yunohost.org on a $5 Linode server and spent some of the weekend spinning up my own little instances of things.
Last time(s) I tried something like this (e.g. Cpanel, Sandstorm, Cloudron) it was kind of 🥴😵💫🫠.
But aside from a few small puzzles along the way, @yunohost is totally easy to use, smartly designed, and kind of delightful.
It’s hard to believe individuals and small groups are still paying per user for collab tools, when it’s gotten so doable to self-host a relatively unlimited server full of alternatives for $5:
Airtable → NoCoDB
Notion → Outline
Substack/Medium → Ghost
Zapier/Make → n8n
Slack/Discord → Mattermost/Rocketchat/Matrix
Tableau → Metabase
Bitly → Yourls
GitHub → Gitea/Gitlab
Mailchimp → Listmonk
Instagram → Pixelfed
Twitter → Mastodon
Zoom/Meet → Jitsi/BigBlueButton
Google Drive → Nextcloud
Another observation, there are a few areas where it seems like the best or most popular option is already the open source/self-hostable one? 🤘
Forums (Discourse, phpBB)
Governance (Loomio)
CMSes (Wordpress, Drupal, Strapi, etc.)
Maybe also true for categories like OSes, Servers, Browsers. Others?
One downside: in the long run I bet this is a bad strategy for longevity/digital preservation, unless backups and archiving become a lot easier. Would be cool if there was a one-click kind of way to push an entire project’s collaborative files to archive.org, when you’re trying to wind things down.
Last year I lost a server full of stuff by forgetting to renew, and the host said it’s gone and not their problem. 🤦♂️
My Google Drive, on the other hand, still has docs in it from 14 years ago. 👀
