Dig Deeper Community Forum

hi. i think this seems like a pretty good topic for the privacy paranoiac (or, a reasonable man in other words) forum board, since there's a lot of appeal in self-hosting for those kinds. despite the name, vps conversation is probably allowed (despite issues like users not actually owning the server) since i've heard some people (like shadow forums(?)) route their home server through a vps, so it'll probably come up sooner.

I've been meaning to talk about self-hosting as a new sublimation of mine, after going ahead and finally asking for my ISP to allow port forwarding (I thought this was a default feature for all providers but I guess not), so all of the ports I set up beforehand finally work flawlessly. I'm pretty noobish and lazy, so my basic set-up right now is a RaspPi 3B running Raspbian, which just works.
...if you'd like to know what I initially set this up for, it was for a stupid IM for people to talk with anime character avatars. The only website I've set up was a file repository for it that didn't work, with my raw IP because I'm slacking on DNS.
I've been thinking of other possible things to host on it as well, mainly a personal gopherhole/website larping as a gopherhole (I just don't have much worthwhile content to host at the moment), but possibly more public things like another 4get or uguu instance, or torrents for video archives or my retarded collection of reaction images... (i'm not interested in media enough to host it, i have externals for that)

I think that's enough about me, I'd just like to see how other people's hardware and software setups are now, if they have anything.

If I were to host anything, at this point I'd do it on I2P. And if I had to host something on the clearnet, I wouldn't self-host without a proxy - nothing about hosting services on your bare IP screams "privacy paranoiac".
>gopherhole
In my opinion those alt protocols like gopher and gemini are largely pointless HipsterTech. I2P is miles better.
That may have sounded like apples and oranges, but they're both similar in that they're seen as more "based" alternatives to hosting a normal website, and they would alienate 95% of a potential userbase, but the difference is that one just makes your site's design simple as if you couldn't just write minimalist HTML pages yourself, and the other is an antisemitic anonymity and privacy network (and most websites on I2P don't have JewShit or anything anyway).
Maybe you could host a gopher/gemini site on I2P, but if you were to choose one, it's I2P for sure.
>torrents
I think it could be neat to do that on I2P as well. As good as torrents are, broadcasting your IP to everyone is a huge flaw in the protocol, and it's hard to avoid for a P2P technology, but I2P manages to fix that issue.

Maybe I sound like an I2P fanatic or shill, but in reality, I don't use it that much myself yet, but I think that darknets are the future, seeing what direction the world and the internet are heading to, and I2P seems to be the best darknet currently available.

moeloli wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 11:01 am nothing about hosting services on your bare IP screams "privacy paranoiac".

i wasn't saying that i was one (not too fussed), just thought it would be a familiar topic to this userbase

moeloli wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 11:01 am >gopherhole
In my opinion those alt protocols like gopher and gemini are largely pointless HipsterTech. I2P is miles better.

i won't deny the hipster allegations, most people i see using gopher right now are middle-aged men with families and only some autogynephiles. i've never touched gemini at all, and i won't considering i've heard it's only agps.
eepsites sound alright but i've never been able to successfully use I2P so i've really never considered it. darknets aren't completely perfect, tor right now is a bit compromised by kraut and norwegian nodes, but much more better than poo and LLM-ridden clearnet

moeloli wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 11:01 am Maybe you could host a gopher/gemini site on I2P, but if you were to choose one, it's I2P for sure.

i've considered a hidden service gopherhole but as i've realized, the amount of browsers that could potentially access that is low, even for the tui browsers which only either support gopher or socks proxies, and using software through torsocks hasn't really worked out for me. that would probably alienate most visitors even more. imagine that with something with less users now.
i did talk in the MUC once about hosting a normal site that's just an index/bunch of directories where i just serve .txt files and other file formats, images, e-books... i didn't get that to work with tor for some reason (maybe i was required to serve a .html index file?)

moeloli wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 11:01 am I think it could be neat to do that on I2P as well. As good as torrents are, broadcasting your IP to everyone is a huge flaw in the protocol, and it's hard to avoid for a P2P technology, but I2P manages to fix that issue

i actually completely forgot that i2p has a torrent focus too

slop

malformed_jill wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 3:54 pm eepsites sound alright but i've never been able to successfully use I2P so i've really never considered it. darknets aren't completely perfect, tor right now is a bit compromised by kraut and norwegian nodes, but much more better than poo and LLM-ridden clearnet

I wonder why, I2P is pretty easy to get up and running, just as easy as TOR in my opinion. And about the glownodes on TOR, you can exclude certain country codes in your torrc.

lostuser wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 4:29 pm I2P is pretty easy to get up and running

okay it was easy
i think the problem with what i was doing is that i was testing eepsites that were down (only this worked) so i thought stuff just didn't work

slop

My self-hosting setup at the moment is just a device at my home proxied through a wireguard tunnel to a vps. Its time to look into i2p i suppose, havent used it much yet