memes

Yeah? That was the intention, lol. I self-host not because I'm a tinfoil hatter but because I want to be in charge of my own data.

I'm under no illusion that my public submissions can't/won't be scraped. My goal is simply to not give surveillance capitalists a mainline to my personal data nor allow myself to be turned into or used as a product to be mined and sold; I choose what I want to share. I put it out into the world, and whatever comes of it does (or doesn't).

The difference is that only what I choose to share can be mined and not everything.

I felt that lol.

Not really, though there's probably something like that out there. It's more a collection of skills that build on each other, finding a problem to solve, and then solving it (with occasional detours along the way to fill in any knowledge gaps).

Basically, just stack these on top of each other:

1. Learn basic Linux skills (I can't in good conscious recommend hosting or even using Windows)
2. Familiarize yourself with web standards. Don't have to be an expert, just understand the basic concepts (web traffic is HTTP based, HTTP usually runs on port 80, HTTPS is secure/encrypted HTTP, don't send passwords over HTTP, etc).
3. Find a self-hosted project you'd like to play with. Usually you can just google "self hosted {thing}" such as "Self hosted trello"
4. The previous step will typically land you on a Github or other project page. Review the docs for getting started on those.
5. You'll likely encounter terms or things you don't understand. Detour to familiarize yourself with them.
6. Follow the steps to get your first service up and running.
7. Enjoy!
8. Once you're past that, you can fine tune, re-deploy in a better way, or otherwise optimize.

The next thing you decide to deploy will usually be easier and will further extend and cement the skills you've just used.

It's definitely a process and collection of skills rather than just one monolithic thing, but each one builds off the other. There's a learning curve, sure, but just reading the docs for different things will usually get you going or provide a "jumping off" point. e.g. Many services utilize Docker, so you'll see that in a lot in the docs and probably end up detouring to learn the basics of working with it.

Some self-hostable applications do have easy deploy scripts which can definitely be good for beginners, but I tend to not like those as if/when something goes wrong, you're ill-equipped to do any meaningful troubleshooting.

Members of various selfhosted communities are usually happy to help as long as you're willing to learn; we typically don't like to just do it for you lol.