I’ve been building a project to preserve family voices, stories, photos, and history, and one question has influenced almost every design decision:
Should something this personal ever require people to trust someone else’s servers?
That’s what pushed me toward making it open source and fully self-hostable. If someone wants to keep their family’s memories on hardware they own, they should be able to.
That said, I know not everyone wants to run a server, so I’m also offering a managed hosted version. The idea isn’t to lock anyone into a platform or build another big cloud service—it simply helps fund the project for people who’d rather not manage the infrastructure themselves.
For those of you who self-host, I’m curious:
Would you actually self-host something this personal?
What would make you trust (or distrust) a project like this?
What are some mistakes you’ve seen developers make when they say they support self-hosting?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing how this community thinks about it before I finish everything up.
No. The only one in my family with skills or motivation to maintain it is me.
If I was going to do something managed, I would use a big cloud service, because even with Google enshittifying and killing projects all the time, it’s still more reliable than some random guy.
But there’s not much point in that when a couple archival-quality scrapbooks, journals, photo albums, and video/audio interviews can do the same thing with no rug to pull.
Yeah I felt the same, but figured that out would be good for people to have options 😃 especially to the point of being the only one in the family with the skills or motivation… I’m about the only technical one so I wanted to make it easy enough (the app itself more than the technical upkeep) so that they could just use it like they do Facebook but it still their data that they can own if they want
I do, and have printed instructions in a “When I die” sealed envelope.
But I think this is more of a people problem than a technical one. 99% of the pictures in my immich instance are of no interest to anyone else, along with most other things I back up. Some websites I’ve made I’d like to continue so have their source in github and on free hosting, but eventually the domains will expire and they’ll go away.
What you can’t provide is selecting what’s important enough to the family and what they want shared, which is the hardest part. And in some cases, that’s what people post on socials. How you want to be remembered is often just your facebook feed.
Yeah that was part of what I wanted to do too. I was thinking through that and like there’s some stories that I wouldn’t want to post on Facebook. I know there’s ways to do it where you can limit who sees it, but it’s not really easy.
I figured this would be more just for family and maybe family friends and I wanted people to be able to have their own data that is for them rather than sometimes open for anyone to see.
I already do.
Hell millions of people trust Google with this information so clearly very few people even care.
That’s a very good point lol
I think maybe there’s just not enough options for people or at least more specific to family anyways
Here’s some questions:
- What happens when you die?
- What happens if your house is burgled or catches fire?
- How do you protect against pe(s)ts making themselves at home in your server?
- What happens with a power or internet outage?
- What happens with hardware failure?
- What happens if you suffer dementia?
- How are you dealing with AI bots?
- How are you mitigating hacking attempts, security, authentication and exploits?
- How are you dealing with data corruption?
- How do you mitigate against ransomware having entered your systems?
Note that I’m not picking on you, nor is this list comprehensive or in priority order. I’m trying to determine if you’ve considered these common issues and concerns associated with hosting stuff that has great sentimental value, if not actual value.
Don’t feel picked on at all, these are great questions! Here’s my thoughts:
What happens when you die?
- this is a great question and I’m actually adding an option where you can assign family members to be able to access your account and be able to upload the local content to the hosted. That way it can easily go from self hosted to cloud for when that happens and there’s nobody technical to keep it up with a single button.
[I grouped the below questions together with the same answer] This is where backups matter, and I’m thinking of setting up a backup system where you can have it backed up wherever you want instead of using the hosted services I’ll have up. Or at the very least a make it easy to setup for people
- What happens if your house is burgled or catches fire?
- How do you protect against pe(s)ts making themselves at home in your server?
- What happens with a power or internet outage?
- What happens with hardware failure?
- What happens if you suffer dementia?
- How are you dealing with data corruption?
[And the below grouped] This is where I’m looking at industry standards for managing and mitigating. Ensuring I have proper API key rotations, security scans, etc. The AI bots is interesting but I think needing an account for content should help on this side
- How are you dealing with AI bots?
- How are you mitigating hacking attempts, security, authentication and exploits?
- How do you mitigate against ransomware having entered your systems?
Really some great questions that got me thinking and making some changes to it
this is certainly a good list of questions, but isn’t the answer to most of them just good backup hygiene? and how are ai bots a threat to me?
AI bots will hammer your endpoints into the ground if left unchecked. They’ll happily compromise your services while they’re at it.
It looks like cloudflare has some mitigating services in place you can implement but that’s for sure something I’m starting to look at
I’m already hosting something similar I think. I am hosting a Immich instance for me and my wife to back up our photos from phones and computers and I also host a PeerTube instance for videos and some audio (I don’t have so much audio only).
What would make me trust a special software for it is things which validate it from outside like stars on github or other people blogging about it what they’re using it, and history which is at least a year so I can see that it’s not just a quickly vibecoded project which will be abandoned soon. Also if there would be a export to HTML or so so that I could get a static archive if the project really stops being supported.
Absolutely great points! And I love the idea of having an HTML export option and/or pdf option as well.
I’m hoping I’ll be able to have some stars and history on that side at some point 😁
I don’t really store stuff like this (well, I do use immich). If I really cared about this kind of stuff, I’d probably self-host, but encrypt archives and backup to cloud storage. For small files (e.g. documents/text), I used to use Syncthing, since it was unlikely that all my devices would get destroyed at the same time, but now I just use Proton Drive since I’m already paying for email and VPN.
A project like this would need to be open source, and encryption needs to happen client-side for trust.
Docker (and in my case, TrueNAS apps), with a single data volume to backup makes things a lot easier.
Yeah I was shopping the same, but found I wanted something more specific to family, and something that would be easier for my family to setup and use. That’s the hardest part about self hosting is that sometimes it’s really hard to setup for regular users and I can’t get my family to use it. Of it’s not just a sign in button it’s too much for non-technical people
I’m trying to make sure that I have everything encrypted and secure. I just got it (I think) ready for public scrutiny [gulp]. So we will see but it is open source
