I got to thinking; self-hosted is the way to go for pretty much everything. It’s awesome to host your own social network, your own blog, your own email, etc. The problem comes from not everyone being technically inclined enough to set all this stuff up, and/or, not having the time to do so.

I wonder why there are no install everything programs out there? Or, maybe even a distro with a configure script that runs when you login for the first time that configures everything.

I have heard there is one for email, which is particularly difficult to set up, called mail in a box. There needs to be something more over all, something that sets up everything and makes the process easy.

@celtichawk Setting email up to not get marked as spam is where the difficulty comes from. It takes txt records, and a few other hoops. Of course Gmail will mark most things that are not gmail as spam, but G hasn’t been a good internet citizen in years, so not surprising.

With the right dns provider, however, that the records could even be handled through the api, so that could be scripted as well.

@celtichawk I haven’t used mail in a box myself, so I can’t say from experience. I have a friend, however, who uses it and loves it.

@fastfinge yeah, backups are important. My setup is pretty simple though. I have a pi4 server, so once a week or so I just clone the sd card.

Mail is a bit more involved, because you can’t run it from home. If you do, you will be labeled as spam by large providers no matter what, so it’s on a vps. Some vps providers do offer an image backup.

A setup script/program would have to incorporate some sort of backup option eventually. maybe just database copying to an offsite location, it’s definitely something worth thinking about. Maybe I’ll actually start writing something and see how far it gets. Letting the large providers handle stuff for you is a perfectly valid way of doing things, but for those who want to do it themselves, an easy setup option could be a good thing.