I joined a Signal group called “Sovereign Tech”, where me and my fellow geeks geek out and brainstorm various ways to have Data Sovereignty, independent of Big Tech. We’re a bunch of longtime, crusty, jaded Linux hardcores, pretty much.

I made a video for them showing my own “Sovereign Stack”. It mostly consists of a bunch of Raspberry Pis, various Open Source software, Heimdall, Wireguard, and lots of “split DNS”. I also show off some SelfHosting web services like Calibre-Web, InvoiceNinja, Flarum, CopyParty and Immich, with remote access through Wireguard possible.

If you aren’t a geek, you probably won’t enjoy this video: Sovereign Tech

I’ve got copyparty working behind a proper reverse proxy. This allows it to be publicly accessed using a nice domain name with SSL. A reverse proxy (on a cloud VPS) re-directs the https traffic into my home lab where Copyparty is running on a Raspberry Pi 4: Some geek friends of mine did some stress testing all at once on this Copyparty server. It could take a savage, nasty beating and survive.

Dear fellow or potential fellow gotosocial instance admins, I’ve come up with a novel way to set up a gotosocial server behind a reverse proxy, which avoids the use of making new firewalling rules - both on a VPS, and creating port forwarding on one’s home router. This method is ideal for minimizing the cost of running one’s own ActivityPub/Mastodon server, in a way that leverages inexpensive fast storage on the backend (say, on a RaspberryPi 5, 2GB of RAM, with an NVMe).