Dear Fedi friends,
If you follow me on the Fediverse (my GoToSocial account @elena@aseachange.com) you might have come across my posts yesterday as I struggled to set up the YunoHost self-hosting system on my Raspberry Pi 5.
The installation itself was a piece of cake and only took a few minutes… the problem was getting out of Terminal and beginning to use YunoHost’s wonderful graphical user interface. A blank page came up and I couldn’t do anything… but keep using YunoHost in Terminal.
A point worth emphasizing: YunoHost is WONDERFUL, so this is not their problem. Remember, I'm a newbie who doesn't have much coding experience.
The purpose of my exercise was to document the YunoHost installation process for an upcoming blog post about self-hosting from the point of view of a newbie.
Thanks to the wonderful YunoHost.org I have managed to deploy and use so many amazing free, open source projects: from GoToSocial, to Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, LinkStack and NextCloud… for 10 months now. So why all the issues all of a sudden?
Well, I had installed and I’m using YunoHost on a VPS, not a physical machine that I have at home. And yesterday’s difficulties demonstrated to me that for a total newbie, maybe a VPS installation is the safest choice, instead of an old computer or a Raspberry Pi, which add a layer of difficulty.
Because I’m really persistent and I don’t like to give up too easily, yesterday I attempted the whole process a second time. Following the advice from two Fediverse people - Jan and Fernando - I attempted to install YunoHost ON TOP of Debian on my Pi… Problem is, when I re-flashed the SD card with a stock Pi OS that came recommended, and I powered up my Pi I found myself in Terminal - AGAIN.
That was pretty much the last straw. I resolved then and there to just use my Pi 5 as a Ubuntu desktop computer… to try out what Linux is like and familiarize myself with it.
Then I installed YunoHost on a dormant VPS I have and well... the whole process took 5 minutes, was smooth, easy and I got to their beautiful and fun graphical user interface post-installation. Even the DNS records propagated really quickly. It felt like magic, once again.
For every Fediverse software I wrote about since last summer (from Friendica to Sharkey and GoToSocial) I made sure to have used the tool in question for at least a month… sometimes two months… in order to have some authority in what I was writing about.
I cannot in good conscience write a YunoHost guide for beginners that is based on a Raspberry Pi or old computer installation. I encountered so many difficulties - given my inexperience with coding - that it would be foolish to recommend this to a fellow newbie.
But self-hosting on a VPS? That I know how to do. It's quick and easy and seamless. I’ve been doing this daily for 10 months now and I’ve gotten comfortable editing settings in Terminal.
So all this to say: sadly I am giving up on the Raspberry Pi as a YunoHost server experiment and I will be focusing my guide on VPSs. Yes, yes, yes, I know a VPS is another person’s computer, but it also has some perks.
As Irwene wrote to me on GoToSocial:
Self-Hosting on a pi, means self-hosting on your own network, if anything goes wrong security wise and someone with bad intentions gets access to the pi, they are in your network. Compared to if they get in the VPS, you might lose data, you might get your vps banned, but your home network will stay safe.
In addition to the network safety part, there is also something else at play for me that’s related to the actual machine and home server setup. I am reluctant to have a Pi acting as a server that is on 24/7 and at risk of overheating.
I had an incident at home last week where one of my appliances almost caught fire. It was a USB-powered night lamp that had stopped charging. Last week I found a compatible cable and thought to try it with the night lamp. Well, it’s a lucky thing I was working nearby because I noticed a lot of heat coming from my desk. The cable plugged into the lamp caused it to overheat and both the cable and the lamp had started melting. Had I not been near, acting swiftly to unplug it, it would have certainly caught fire.
Now I am mindful of whatever is plugged in at home before I leave the house and I’m not a fan of having something that could potentially overheat… especially if I’m abroad or an hour away from home at my in laws’.
A virtual private server looks super attractive to me, now more than ever.
I realize that if you’re a developer and you’re reading this, my tone may make you a little disappointed. You may think: “no please Elena, try again.”
Thing is, if I am to recommend something to a fellow self-hosting newbie, I’d like them to have a good experience up front, so that they will stay positive and curious. I am lucky to now have a lot of Fediverse developer friends and contacts who routinely volunteer to help me out (I’m so grateful for this!) but not everyone is as lucky. Especially people that don’t have a technical background. I truly feel this is the way to go (even if I, myself, am a little disappointed I couldn’t get the Raspi to work as I intended).
Anyway, I’m now working on a step-by-step guide for YunoHost from the point of view of a newbie and I hope it will be useful for people.
My big dilemma now is: what should I install? (Sharkey is super tempting but GoToSocial would probably be more useful).
Thanks for all your advice and help in the Fediverse and I’m hoping to be able to give back at some point.
Elena
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