sbeak

One thing of note, since Pixelfed is part of the Fediverse, posts made on Pixelfed instances can be seen by users of Mastodon and other platforms that use the same protocol! It’s really neat!

their results seem mostly identical to ddg/bing too though it’s occasionally better than them for some reason

I believe Ecosia uses either Google or Bing search indexes depending on the region, but they are working on an independent index with Qwant that will hopefully be a good alternative! If you live in France, it’s already bring trialled!

But yeah, Ecosia is like any search engine and there is bit of greenwashing with LLMs and all. However, they are a non-profit with transparent earnings reports, and that makes them better than Google, Bing, DDG, etc. for me.

they geoblock certain countries including mine since 2023 or so

Dang, that sucks.

That’s fair enough (unfortunately, this is the case for most search engines aside from SearXNG instances I think)! Thankfully they do let you disable it, which is nice. I mostly like that they are quite transparent about how they operate! The planting trees thing is a nice bonus, but they certainly aren’t saints to the environment, no search engine is

searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…

Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition

As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it’s not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn’t great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don’t particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.

Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.

Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!

I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.

Understood! I have edited my comment to reflect that

Wait, I thought we recently agreed that LLM assisted projects require a [AIP] tag? Did you not see the pinned post, or are you not human?

edit: Wait, I have been told this is incorrect, it’s not a rule just yet and is still being discussed

As for me, I just use Syncthing between my devices so I have the same music files in my laptop and my phone. It works well as I don’t often change out the music I listen to, and plus it’s local files so no network required (good on an aeroplane, for example). I personally use an MPD client on my (Linux) laptop, while on Android I use Auxio (Lotus and Chocola are excellent too)

If that doesn’t work for you, there is Jellyfin as well: Finamp for specifically music playback, Findroid for general Jellyfin use. Am not hosting Jellyfin currently so I don’t have anything to add besides that, but do check out the docs if you need help setting up / maintaining it!

We were all kids at one point in time

Lots of modern phones no longer come with an IR blaster, which is a bit stupid I think but corporations got to save cost somewhere (+ a billion other places in the device, manufacturing, production, etc.)

I found the LearnLinuxTV tutorial on installing Nextcloud to be really good, and it’s been running great! It’s excellent if you want drive and has all the different other bits like notes, calendar, forms, office, etc.

However, you might also want to look at some other services too for specific tasks. I use Radicale for calendar, mostly because it was my first self-hosted service and I never bothered moving to the NC offering, but it’s very simple to setup and works well for me. Etherpad is good if you want shareable MD notes (but isn’t as great if you want private notes, for that local programs like Joplin, Marktext, and Markor are your best bet). For image hosting, Immich is always nice and has excellent mobile clients too (even on Linux mobile, you have the third-party Mimick!)

Quarrtarrmastarr? Or is that too much?

I personally just use local music playback, with SyncThing for syncing between devices. That mean I can listen to them offline!

On Android, I use Auxio, but Lotus and Chocola (previously CuteMusic) are awesome too.

On Linux, I use an mpd-based option called rmpc. Tauon and Gapless are also great! As for mobile Linux, Gapless is a good option that works pretty well. You might also like Plattenalbum, a GTK-based MPD client.

Nice, good to hear! Radicale is really nice and simple to setup too. If you want a good desktop calendar app, I know that both GNOME Calendar and Thunderbird work well with Radicale (I currently use the latter).

1. Always read the documentation!!!

Now for specific recommendations, I can can share my own experience. I started out with hosting something very basic that I had a need for. Nothing fancy, something that’s relatively easy to set up. I hosted Radicale, a CalDAV server that can sync calendars. It was a little fussy about permissions but I was able to sort it out by reading the documentation. I heard Baikal is another good option for that too. Previously, I only used local calendars, as never bothered with Google or Outlook calendar, and if was refreshing to have my events be locally synced! Super neat!

If you have a small, simple need like that, it can be your baby steps into self-hosting. A small calendar, a to-do list, DNS (i.e. PiHole), web server, something like that which you have a need for. Just make sire you read the documentation!

Afterwards, you can “level up” to more complex projects. For file hosting, I use Nextcloud, but OpenCloud is a good option if you need something lighter weight. LearnLinuxTV has an excellent guide on installing Nextcloud! You also have Immich for photo backup, and the documentation for it is excellent. You really should read the docs, for any kind of software! And if you do any programming, having a local Forgejo instance is always good for an additional backup to a cloud git repo service like Codeberg or GitHub. If you have a large collection of media of any kind, Jellyfin (for videos), Audiobookshelf (for…audiobooks), and Navidrome (for music) are all recommended.

As for the OS, I would recommend Debian. It’s rock solid, there’s a bazillion guides for it and Ubuntu (a Debian derivative), and it works well for my use case. Much of the documentation for all kinds of self-hosted applications assumes that you use Debian or some derivative of it. However, if you want a better way to manage networking, RAID configurations, etc., going with an OS tailored for use in NAS systems would be better. I heard that TrueNAS is a really good option for that! Just make sure you read the documentation before you fiddle around with settings.

On the hardware side, I would always go with something you already have over buying new hardware, and if you really don’t have anything, getting some used is always good. Reduce e-waste and save your money! I used (and still use!) an old laptop for self-hosting, since it was what I had available and my storage needs were not massive. That poor 512GB SSD is really putting in the work.

Have I mentioned that you should always read the documentation?

Aside from a lot of the ones that are abbreviations (like GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP), most of them are fine I think.

Immich, it sounds like “image”, which makes sense for photo hosting. Inkscape is a landscape of ink, suitable for a vector graphics editor. “Chrono”, the clock app on Android, is named after the embodiment of time. Radicale, the CalDAV self-hosted service, is the word “radical” conjoined with “calendar”. KeePass is a password manager, a master key is used to unlock the vault. KDE likes to put “K” in front of a lot of their app names. KCalc, KGet, Konsole, KOrganizer, KAlarm, KWrite. Their functions are pretty self explanatory. Okular is a PDF reader by KDE, and the name is a play on the word “ocular”, used to describe vision, but with a “K”! MarkText lets you write text in Markdown format. LibreOffice is a free (as in freedom, or libre) open-source office suite. Writer, Impress, and Calc are related to documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. And then there are all the apps that are not unique and are simply what they are. Think “Offline Translator”, “OSS Document Scanner”, etc. (very common with a lot of Android apps I use)

I would imagine Kittygram refers to the vast quantities of cat photos on Instagram.

Having a large internet personality like Pewdiepie advocate for privacy, self-hosting, and open-source is always good!

Vikunja is a great option, but the mobile app is still in development (lots of missing features). I like it, but I have found that using a simple markdown editor like Markor (on Android) and Marktext (on Linux, available on Windows + Mac too) works for me, and I use Syncthing to sync with my laptop. Note that Marktext isn’t being actively developed anymore, but it was the best one I could find that respects the folder structure of my notes. Obsidian is great too, but it’s closed source and having everything in vaults is annoying for me. You might also like VSCodium or Kate, which are code editors that also have markdown highlighting (but not Markdown preview).

However, you can’t easily use custom themes with Markor and Marktext. For Markor, you can only change the background, font, and text colour of the editing mode (not the preview mode!) while Marktext does let you change the font universally, but you have to use one of the prebuilt themes (I found One Dark to be the closest to my system theme). One day I would like to try my hand at making my own cross-platform markdown editor, maybe once I have less schoolwork to worry about.

edit: I was wrong, Marktext is actively developed! Additionally, the latest version of Marktexts lets you use custom CSS to create your own theme, and there are far more default themes to choose from now!

As per his video, he states that he wishes that he could magically make AI go away and that he “hates everything in his project”, but since that’s not possible, he would prefer if people using AI did so using their own hardware and not some company’s cloud servers.

Make of that what you will. I think it’s pretty neat, not for me, but I’m sure someone will find it useful.

Note that I have seen a lot of people make some really cool “rehousings” of their laptops to turn them into transparent boxes mounted to the wall, usually made of something like acrylic. They look awesome, but haven’t tried it myself since I just self-host using my laptop in its original chassis

I personally use Syncthing-Fork. It works well enough for me, but I know a lot of people run it through Termux. Haven’t tried it myself though, so unsure what the limitations are. BasicSync is also new to me. There isn’t a “proper” way, it just depends on your use case I think!