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<h1 class="text-indigo-400 text-3xl">Road2FOSS - My Journey to Privacy by Self-Hosting</h1>
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<span class="text-md mt-2">Posted on 2019-10-06</span>
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<!-- Actual article -->
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<article class="prose lg:prose-lg text-white mt-4">
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<p>About one year ago, I made plans to ditch many of the proprietary services that I used
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on a daily basis and replace them with FOSS alternatives. Now it is a year later and
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while my project is not done, I really did quite a lot.</p>
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<span id="continue-reading"></span><h2 id="history">History</h2>
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<p>But why do all this?</p>
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<p>The answer consists of three main points, though they are weighed differently:</p>
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<ol>
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<li>Privacy: The inspiration for this project came from the fact that I did not trust my messaging application back then. It was proprietary and probably collecting all the data it could, thus I wanted to get away from it.</li>
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<li>Learning: I really enjoy tinkering with computer hardware, software and am quite interested in server administration. Hence, I thought it would be a greate learning opportunity for me.</li>
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<li>Fun: I do enjoy this kind of work, so I thought it would be a fun, but quite major, side project.</li>
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</ol>
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<p>I knew that it would be a major undertaking but I still wanted to give it a try.</p>
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<h2 id="instant-messaging">Instant Messaging</h2>
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<p>Judging by the amount of personal data I leak when texting people I know I wanted to switch IM services
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as quickly as possible.</p>
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<p>At this stage, there were three candidates for me:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><em>Signal</em></li>
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<li><em>Matrix</em> with Riot</li>
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<li><em>Jabber/XMPP</em></li>
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</ul>
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<p>Originally, <em>Signal</em> was my preferred choice since I really liked its interface. But the problem with Signal,
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and I do not blame the developers for this one, is that the service only works with a mobile device running
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the app. If I wanted to run <em>Signal</em> on my computer because, for example, my phone is broken or the battery
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is empty, then I just could not since it requires my phone to be online. Also, which I learned only just recently,
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<em>Signal</em>'s <em>Android</em> app has a bug which <a href="https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8658">drains the phone's battery</a>
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when one does not have <em>Google services</em> installed on their phone.</p>
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<p><em>Matrix</em> in combination with Riot was another idea of mine. But here the problem was the mobile app. It
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seemed to me more like the interface of messengers like <em>Slack</em> and <em>Discord</em>, which I personally do not like
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for mobile Instant Messaging. When I last looked at the entire <em>Matrix</em> ecosystem, there was only one
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well-working client for mobile, which was Riot. Additionally, the homeserver was difficult to set up; at least much more than
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<em>Prosody</em>, to which I will come in the next paragraph. Moreover, I read in the the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190921180013/https://disroot.org/en/blog/donating_floss"><em>Disroot blog</em></a> that they have
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quite some problems with their <em>Matrix</em> homeserver as <em>"[...] [k]eeping room history and all metadata connected to them forever
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is a terrible idea, in our opinion, and not sustainable at all. One year of history is way too much already [...]"</em>. This
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was the end for the idea of self-hosting a <em>Matrix</em> server.</p>
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<p><em>Jabber/XMPP</em> being something I saw only once way back when browsing a linux forum, I became interested. It
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checked all my requirements: It is cross-platform, as it is only a protocol, allows self-hosting with FOSS
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software and, the most important factor, includes End-to-End-Encryption using <em>OMEMO</em>. I also started to
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appreciate federated software solutions, which made <em>Jabber</em> the clear winner for me. Tehe <em>Jabber</em> clients
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that I now use on a daily basis are also very fine pieces of opensource software: <em>Conversations</em>' interface
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is simple, works without draining my battery and it just works. <em>Gajim</em>, after some configuration and tweaking,
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works really well, looks clean and simple and I would really love to replace <em>Discord</em> on the desktop with
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<em>Gajim</em>.</p>
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<p>Recently, I also started to use <em>Profanity</em>, which seems a bit rough around the edges and sometimes does not
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work, but maybe I am just doing something wrong.</p>
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<p>In terms of server software I initially wanted to go with <em>ejabberd</em>. But after seeing its amount of
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documentation, I just chose <em>Prosody</em>. It is the software that was the least painful to set up with all
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requirements for modern messaging being covered by it internal or external modules. It also never crashed;
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only when I messed the configuration up with syntax errors.</p>
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<p>Since I use <em>Discord</em> and it is more difficult to bring people over from there, I went with a compromise
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and started to bridge the channels I use the most to a <em>Jabber MUC</em> using <a href="https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge"><em>matterbridge</em></a>.
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Thus I can use those channels without having to have the <em>Discord</em> app installed on my devices.</p>
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<p>Another use I got out of <em>Jabber</em> is the fact that I can create as many bot accounts on my server as I want. While this
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sounds like I use those bots for bad things it is the opposite: I use them to tell me when something is wrong
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using <em>netdata</em> or for the already mentioned bridge between <em>Discord</em> and <em>Jabber</em>.</p>
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<h2 id="voip">VoIP</h2>
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<p>VoIP is something that I use even more than plain Instant Messaging, which is why I wanted to self-host
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a FOSS VoIP-solution. The most commonly used one is <em>Mumble</em>, which was a run-and-forget experience. Especially
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when not using the full server but a smaller one like <em>umurmur</em>.</p>
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<h2 id="code">Code</h2>
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<p>At first, I used <em>Github</em>. But after <em>Microsoft</em> bought it, I was a bit sceptical and switched to <em>Gitlab</em>, which
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worked really well. It was even opensource so I started using it. But after some time, I found that
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there are some things that annoy me with <em>Gitlab</em>. This includes it automatically enabling "Pipelines" when I
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just created a repository even though I never enabled those.</p>
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<p>That was when I came across <em>gogs</em> and <em>gitea</em>; the latter being my current solution. I wanted a simple
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software that I can just run and has a somewhat nice interface. Why the nice interface? I want that if people
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look at my code that it feels familiar to browse it in the browser. Also, I can invite friends to use it if
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they also want to get away from proprietary services and software.</p>
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<p>My instance has registrations disabled as I do not have the time to moderate it, but I have seen that federation
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of some sorts, in the context of <em>ForgeFed</em>, is being discussed on the issue tracker, though you should not quote
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me on this one.</p>
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<p><em>Gitea</em> was mostly a run-and-forget experience for me and is working very well.</p>
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<h2 id="personal-information-management">Personal Information Management</h2>
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<p>Since I've started to use calendars more, I wanted a solution to sync those across my devices. Before this entire
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project I was using <em>Google</em>'s own calendar service. Then I started using <em>Disroot</em>'s NextCloud to synchronize
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calendar data. However, it not being encrypted at rest was a concern for me as my calendar does contain some
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events that I would not like an attacker to know as this would put the attacker in a position where sensitve
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information can be deduced about me.</p>
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<p>After some looking around, I found <a href="https://github.com/etesync"><em>EteSync</em></a>. This software works really great, given that the server is just
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a simple django app that stores data and does user management and authentication. The <em>Android</em> app, in my case,
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does most of the work and works really well. The only problem I had was the fact that <em>EteSync</em> has no desktop
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client. They provide a web app and a server that bridges between regular DAV and <em>EteSync</em> but nothing like
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a regular client.</p>
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<p>Since I used regular WebDAV services, like the <em>Disroot</em> one I mentioned earlier, I have <a href="https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer"><em>vdirsyncer</em></a>
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installed and configured only to find out that they dropper support for <em>EteSync</em> in the last version.
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Wanting a tool like <em>vdirsyncer</em> but for <em>EteSync</em> I went to work and created <a href="https://git.polynom.me/PapaTutuWawa/etesyncer"><em>etesyncer</em></a>.</p>
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<h2 id="email">EMail</h2>
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<p>Most of my online life I used proprietary EMail-services. Most of that time I used <em>GMail</em>. Since I bought a
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domain for this project and have a server running, I thought: <em>"Why not self-host EMail?"</em>. This is exactly
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what I did!</p>
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<p>I use the "traditional" combination of <em>postfix</em> and <em>dovecot</em> to handle incoming, outgoing EMail and IMAP
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access. Since I use <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190921054652/http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html"><em>mu4e</em></a> in combination with <em>msmtp</em> and <em>mbsync</em> for working with email, I did not
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install a webmail client.</p>
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<p>This was the most difficult part to get working as the configuration sometimes worked and sometimes not.
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The main culprit here was <em>DKIM</em> because it changed the permissions of its files at startup to something else
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which made <em>openDKIM</em> crash. Now it stopped doing this but I am not sure why.
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What made the EMail-server so difficult was also the fact that so much goes into hosting an EMail-server I never
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thought about, like <em>DKIM</em>, <em>SPF</em> or having a <em>FQDN</em>.</p>
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<p>At this point, it pretty much runs itself. It works, it receives EMails, it sends EMails and it allows
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me to view my EMails via IMAP.</p>
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<p>Coming from <em>Protonmail</em>, the only thing that I am missing is encryption of my EMails. Since not every person
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I contact using EMail uses or knows <em>PGP</em>, I would like to encrypt incoming EMails. While there are solutions
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to do this, they all involve encrypting the EMail after they are put in the queue by <em>postfix</em>, which puts
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them on disk. Hence, the mail was once written in plaintext. While I would like to avoid this, I have not
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found a way of doing this without digging into <em>postfix</em>'s code and adding support for this.</p>
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<h2 id="blog">Blog</h2>
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<p>I wanted a blog for a long time and since I had a spare domain lying around, I decided to create one. While
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I could have gone with a solution like <em>Wordpress</em> and the like, they were too complicated for my needs.
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So I just went with the simplest solution which is using a static site generator: <em>jekyll</em> in my case.</p>
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<p>This is one of the points where decentralization was a huge factor directly from the start, as this is exactly
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what the web was made for, so I was actively avoiding any non-selfhost solutions. While I could have gone with
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a federated solution like <em>write freely</em>, I chose the staic page generator as it was much simpler. And because
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I love writing in Markdown.</p>
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<h2 id="webserver">Webserver</h2>
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<p>Since I now use <em>GPG</em> to sign any emails that I send, I needed a way of exposing these keys to the public. While
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I could have gone with a keyserver, I decided against it. Admittedly, I did not look into self-hosting a
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keyserver but this was not my plan. I want to keep everything simple and prevent myself from installing too many
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services on my server. This led me to just putting my public keys on the server and pointing my
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webserver to them.</p>
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<p>Since I run multiple services that are accessible via the browser, I needed the webserver as a reverse proxy,
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pointing my different domain names to the correct services. This way, all services can run on their own ports while
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the reverse proxy "unifies" them on port 443.</p>
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<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
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<p>All in all I am very happy with my setup. It allows me to host my own instances privacy-respecting software the way I like
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to. It gives me something to do and allows me to learn about system administration and different tools like <em>Docker</em>
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or <em>Ansible</em>. So all in all, although the project has no real end, I would say that it was and is a huge success for me.</p>
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<p>During the course of this project, I also switched services like my search engine or the software with which I watch videos
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but as I do not self-host these, I did not mention them.</p>
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If you have any questions or comments, then feel free to send me an email (Preferably with GPG encryption)
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to papatutuwawa [at] polynom.me or reach out to me on the Fediverse at <a href="https://social.polynom.me/papatutuwawa">@papatutuwawa@social.polynom.me</a>.
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