Self-hosting Fediverse, and Etesync

[Jean Louis]

* Ali Reza Hayati <hayati@riseup.net> [2020-10-29 20:38]:
> We can't pay for even small services such as a VPS or a hosting. My
> website is currently hosted by a guy in Germany for free because I can't
> pay anyone for hosting.

You may do it with me, no problems. Riseup is good email address, good
choice. You can host also your own email, anything.

> I really do want to host my own Mastodon or Pixelfed or Peertube
> instances but no, I can't because of sanctions and these sanctions are
> stupid because they don't affect the government but affects us people. I
> can't think of any way that me buying a hosting service can violate U.S.
> or world's laws over nuclear weapons.

For low consumption, you may share with me. Pleroma is running well on
$5 server https://pleroma.gnusocial.club and it has XMPP support too
and other features, I think it has SSH access possiiblity too and
Mastodon compatibility, and people are very GNU friendly.

> Another example is about me myself again. I've been trying to convince
> some collectives to run an EteSync instance, a software libre that uses
> end-to-end encryption to sync contacts and calendars, because I can't
> pay to get an account on etesync.com and nobody will pay $24 a year for
> a dude nobody knows.

I can help you. Yet the approach I have is not that I should
synchronize my programs with remote Internet server. Even if
everything is encrypted I am not following principles of doing it
remotely. Why?

Simply because I have my own computers and storage. I have backups, I
keep backup hard drives and do it regularly or irregularly. My
contacts are in my centralize PostgreSQL database. By using Emacs I am
accessing the database and then deciding which among 195000 contacts
should go into my mobile devices.

Each mobile device that I can convert to Replicant, I would convert,
but I did not buy those phones that can be truly free. I will find
them it is matter of time. Motorola phones I have converted to
LineageOS to be Google free, spy networks free. There are about 4
device. Then from centralized database I am exporting all contacts,
using Emacs Lisp, to vCards. That file with contacts is then imported
to all devices by rsync/ssh from time to time.

All contacts are thus synchronized.

If I have something to share from one device to other, I could simply
send to myself encrypted email.

Just everybody can establish this flow without using anything
special. There is Thunderbird that can handle contacts and there is
Evolution that can handle contacts. By the way I can export contacts
to Evolution and have fully integrated online email system, but I do
not use Evolution on personal computer.

User could be using Evolution or Thunderbird only to manage
contacts. Not to manage necessarily emails, but contacts only. There
is address book feature. And then the contacts can be exported as
vCards and synchronized to other devices.

Problem comes when I am using specific device and I have met 3-4
people in that day, so usually I put their details in a text note in
the device, not in the contact address book. But I could put it in the
address book with the note NEW, so that I can later know that these
contacts I have to synchronize with the main database, so that same
contacts eventually get distributed to other devices.

Another solution for you to host Etesync could be to host it on your
own computer, including on the Replicant/LineageOS/Android mobile
device. Then you could use some of networks such as Tor to open up
service to yourself on other devices. You could use IPFS Internet
https://ipfs.io 

-- 
Jean Louis