ArborNode

Never heard of it, but it doesn’t look legit.

I recently set up a similar thing for my own kids with cinny using contnuwuity as a backend. It was a little tricky to get it all working, but runs great. My kids can video and voice call me from home and can’t talk to people not on the server. Cinny is only one of many options for the matrix client. I like it because I can make a consistent experience across platforms, but if you are just using Android, SchildiNext is my favorite client that I tested.

Great post! I can definitely feel you on the SMTP settup for it being your first time.

Really cool to read the perspective of someone so new to this that’s informative instead of being for help.

Welcome to the club!

I did a very similar setup very recently. Its not bad. I did try piefed first as some people suggested, but had some issues and it felt like it just wasn’t ready yet. I switched to self hosting lemmy and really like it. I also went with Brevo for email (I started with sendgrid, would not recommend).

Main difference for me is I am using cloudflare (they are my registrar and they allow me to deal with the CGNAT at no extra cost which you don’t have to deal with not to mention a pretty solid WAF for free tier). You may want to implement a WAF of some kind to keep the federation in check. I federate both lemmy and a matrix home server and it doesn’t eat up too much bandwidth.

I also like saving money, so a VPS is something I was trying to avoid. Personally, I don’t think the VPS does a much for securing your home network as people are trying to say here. It is another layer of security, but it’s not a panacea. Not saying I’ll never try it though.

To some degree yes. I ran an experiment to see and found there is just too much of the existing internet infrastructure not implementing IPV6 for this to be reliable. For instance, you can’t use it for email intake because only 2 major players do IPV6.

You still get dynamic assignments from the ISP and have to automate keeping your AAAA records up to date.

The short answer is, it depends. For what OP is doing here, I expect it would work.

If anyone else has messed with this, I’d love to here about it. Might be good as it’s own post.

For those of us behind double NAT (CGNAT) forwarding ports is not an option as we do not control forwarding on the second gateway. This will limit you to any of the solutions that include a device outside your network with a public port that tunnels traffic into your server.

If you don’t mind me asking, which model did you have these issues with? I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience.

I like your idea, but minisforum has much better platforms for self hosting. The better options do cost twice as much. Not sure they are cost effective as far as purchase price goes.

I run one with an AMD chip set and very much like it. Its fairly low power usage, but I haven’t measured in a while. For what it’s worth, I really like mine.

I don’t find self hosting lemmy to use much of either.

Are you strictly self hosting with this device? If so there are whole operating systems that make this easy. TrueNAS Scale for example.

I would suggest broadening your search. Debian vs Ubuntu is not much of a difference in my opinion. Videos and just trying some can help you decide.