Homelab Realities

During my journey through POSSE driven social media with a focus on open source/federated applications, I’ve picked up a few insights. As a homelabber, I was curious about running my own social media apps on my private NAS.

While I know it’s possible to expose my NAS/network to the internet, I feel that, from my perspective of being “smart enough to be dangerous,” it’s not the best idea for me. If I want to host something online, like Actual, PeerTube, or Mastodon, It’s more cost-effective (in terms of my time) and safer to use a fully managed DevOps platform like Elest.io or Pikapod. I’m fine with running local applications that don’t need internet exposure, but self-hosting Mastodon seems like a daunting task for someone like me. I still have nightmares about the time I tried to run group WordPress blogs on Transadvocate.com and kept getting hacked with bad MYSQL injections.

For now, I’m sticking to locally hosted, in network apps that don’t go outside my home network. I know myi limitations.