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I run a lot of infrastructure. It is kind of a hobby of mine. I am proud that I can self host and "own" all the tools and software I use. As is the nature of Infrastructure, it requires maintenance. Lately it feels like lots of my infrastructure is past it's maintenance period. I also seem to have less patience for these issues generally. Even though the software I host has never been so reliable in the past as it is now.
But it's not just the Art of Maintenance that is causing me to feel this way. Boris has been saying "Self hosting is Selfish", and it resonates. Most the services I host for myself, and they are lan-local behind a VPN that I also manage. The public facing tools are
- RSS Reader
- RSS Bridge
- Matrix instance
- Forgejo instance
But the matrix server is the only one with more than one user. Even then it's less than 10.
What's the point of hosting all this infrastructure just for me? Is it really in-line with my ethos? Would I be happier without the constant burden of keeping these accessible and open? I'm not so sure anymore. It would be great if I could host for a bunch of people. But I don't particularly want to do community management (it's really hard!), and I'm no good at building communities anyway. Does that mean I should spin up a software hosting service / coop? I don't know either.
I thought the stuff behind my lan would be safe. Nope. Taskwarrior's recent update totally trashes the CLI client, and breaks sync with their Android client. There's really not any other really good, self-hostable open source task list software that I like. I've been using Taskwarrior for almost 10 years now. I thought it would be rock solid. Now I refuse to update Taskwarrior. Luckily, Nix makes this trivial and permanent. But it's another overlay, another file I have to keep track of, that summons my infrastructure.
Largely though, things do work, but it's difficult for them to all work together. I take bookmarks, and save articles for later reading, and can read my rss feeds. Using nvim for my notes is still a limiting factor on android unfortunately. At this point, it's still easier to keep up my servers, than to migrate all my apps to some other service. My life runs on these services, and the bureaucracy of switching is sufficiently high for me not to do it.
Instead I think I want to build my own apps. I think I'll start with a Taskwarrior replacement, Todo lists are always demo products because they're easy right? Maybe if it's good people will want to use it.
At least it's less selfish than selfhosting?