Oh, flac fixes for HLS. I wonder if https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8722 was fixed. I’ll have to try it out today.

Two regions of one provider isn’t really a reliable backup. What if the provider goes out of business, hacked, closes your account or has a software bug that affects all of their storage.

I also had a bad experience where I had a test website under a megabyte in a storage bucket. It was under the free tier and sat there for a few years. Then one month they sent me a bill (it was small, a handful of cents). Contact support saying that this use is under the free tier. They said that data was added then removed from the bucket. I hadn’t logged into the account, no living API keys. They wouldn’t forgive the charge.

Luckily my credit card had expired so they just locked my account.

If you haven’t used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.

If they can shove ads into the GMail UI I’m sure they could have found a place to put them in Google Reader.

Video serving is a very sequential workload so hard drives will be more than sufficient and you can typically get storage at a lower price.

SSD may give you slightly faster start and seeking but it is unlikely to be noticeable.

If you want to serve multiple resolutions and bitrates you will probably want hardware that can do transcoding. However basically any graphics card (even integrated) will be able to transcode a video stream in real-time at a decent quality.

(If you wanted you can try to pre-transcode offline, but Jellyfin doesn’t support this well)

Although getting something that supports AV1 hardware decoding could be forward thinking. For now you are probably fine without it and if you are ripping DVDs you may consider just keeping the original encoding. But most likely you will start to see more AV1 files coming in the future, and having a server that can transcode AV1 to older formats easily will keep everything on your network working properly.

Currently s1 and t6. I’m not a fun person.

Element is running a beta for Video Rooms which is basically exactly this. However it isn’t standardized yet and I haven’t tried it.

I ended up creating my own because I couldn’t find something that did what I want a few years ago when I started looking. My main requirement was easy scaling of ingredients. It has a handful of features around that such as scaling by specifying servings, scaling by setting the amount of a particular ingredient (example making pancakes with leftover buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into the bowl then scale the recipe based on how much was left) and ingredient conversion. In most other ways it is pretty basic and free-form but it does the job. It stores data in a user-provided provider so other people never send me their recipes.

https://recipes.kevincox.ca/

It depends on how much you trust nginx. A HTTP server is probably a bit more complex that your average VPN solution so probably more likely to have vulnerabilities, but it is also the most popular web server on the planet, so if there is a zero day I’m probably not the first target. If you stay up to date you are probably fine.

I do it the simple way. I just stick nginx in front of everything. If I don’t want it to be publicly accessible I stick nginx basic auth in front of it.

The advantages is that I can easily access the services from anywhere on any device with just the password. I only need to trust nginx’s basic auth to keep me protected, not various different service’s authentication.

The downside is that some services don’t work great when you have basic auth in the front. This is often due to things like public links or APIs that need to be accessed with other auth.

I just use nginx because I’ve always used it. I’ve heard that there are newer reverse proxies that are a bit easier to configure.

My Synapse install is using 94MiB of RAM and 500MiB of database disk space. CPU usage is effectively zero. I only have a 3 active users but decades of conversation history for myself (imported from other services). An uncompressed pg_dump of the data is about 250MiB which is within an order of magnitude of the raw text that I have in it. Nearly all of the conversations are encrypted so it wouldn’t compress much.

Given that just running python takes 13MB of RAM it probably isn’t using many resources past loading the code. At least at small scale running a Matrix server is not a notable resource burden for most people. A Matrix server written in a more efficient language (like Conduit) would likely be fairly similar to an XMPP server written in the same language. Either way unless you are hosting thousands of users it doesn’t seem like this is a major problem for either protocol.

I don’t think you can pick out any one reason. XMPP is very old and has extensions for a huge variety of features. Many people have experience with older versions which had many major missing features (such as strong multi-device with offline support and server-side history) and a lot of the “hype” has died out long ago.

Matrix is new and made a lot of decisions that really helped its popularity.

1. Having a HTTP-based client-to-server protocol makes web clients very easy to make.
2. It is based on sync and merging rather than messages which moves some difficult problems (like multidevice and server-side history) into the core protocol meaning that it works well out of the box.
3. Having HTTP based protocols make hosting it familiar for many people.
4. The “default” Element clients have lots of features out of the box, features that for a long time were not always present on XMPP servers or clients. This gives a more consistent experience.

We will see what the history holds. Matrix is still very new and maybe the hype will die out and we end up moving back to XMPP. Or maybe something new. Overall I don’t think there are major fundamental differences. I think Matrix making graph sync the core primitive to build off of was a good idea, but in practice I don’t think it matters much.

You say that XMPP is much lighter. But I think that is mostly due to Synapse not being very efficient. Other implementations are fairly light. Even then my Synapse is using fairly small amounts of resources. You should also check that you are making an apples-to-apples comparison with large rooms, media and message history like you would typically see in a common Matrix server.

I would say podman by default. It has a better security architecture as it can run rootless.

However there are small differences from Docker so you may need use Docker if you are trying to run third-party services that rely on these differences.

Material Files + SFTP is a winning combination. You probably already have SSH configured and it is quite secure.

You don’t need a domain. However it is probably a good idea.

1. You can’t get a globally trusted SSL certificate for an IP address. So you will need to use a self-signed certificate and manage trusting it on every device.
2. If you don’t have a stable IP you will need to update bookmarks whenever it changes and memorizing it may be a chore.

If you don’t want to purchase your own domain you can likely use a free subdomain, this will often come from a dynamic DNS provider.

However if you can I would strongly recommend getting your own domain sooner rather than later. If only because it means that you can own your email address which is basically the keys to all third-party services you use these days. Domains are pretty cheap, probably <$20/year for a generic like .com or the TLD of your country. Personally I would happy skip out on eating out once a year to have my domain.

Try something like https://www.webpagetest.org/ or any other “proxy” service to confirm for youself if it is publicly accessible.

The problem with separating Calendar + Mail + Contacts is that they work best together. Although to be far I am not aware of an open-source system that effectively combines them.

Calendar event invites an updates go over mail. So you want your calendar application to automatically be able to get those. Also options like “automatically add invites from contacts to my calendar” is an awesome feature. Contacts can also be used for spam filtering (although this integration is a bit easier to do externally).

So currently I am using Nextcloud (self-hosted) although I don’t really like it because it is pretty slow on my low-powered VPS. But even still it doesn’t actually have proper email integration. There are bugs open and slowly moving but I’m still using Thunderbird to process most of my calendar stuff.

Not to mention JMAP which is slowly progressing which would be a huge improvement, especially for mobile clients. It also combines these three services.