Meetups/Infra/2025-06-02

With many first-timers, we talked about self-hosting -- the why, the what, and

Introductions

• [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore]

• Loren - background in cloud engineering.
• Alex -- working in ML science space -- here.
• Greg -- software engineer by trade, self-host a lot of stuff -- nothing tonight -- nix stuff?
• Andrew -- software dev & architect, from Atlanta, came for AI conference. Cloud technologies are too complex.
• Jonah -- loren told me about this -- not a developer by trade. Interested in decentralized / self-sovereign / non-corporate tech. Work in tech adjacent space, recruiting
• Emad -- work in front end, frmr civil engineer. Interested in self-hsoting, Fedi-verse. Self-hosting photos, videos, movies. Interested in community self-hosting AI, 12-15 people, community.
• Nick -- here to learn, some techniques to make my life better.
• Jet -- upcoming junior CS major at USF, hope to contribute to some of noisebridge infrastructure.
• Mark -- harging around here for the last couple of weeks, software engineer by trade, working on some AI stuff. Research into self-hosting. PC here looking to offer as a shared resource.
• Elan -- interested in self-hosting as a hobby -- Yak Shaving Done For You (ysdfu)

Lesson or Demo

• Read aloud: clarify for meetup. We are taking notes in a riseup pad (or I am--help appreciated, and links). We have meeting notes posted to the wiki. noisebridge.net, search Infra, or Meetups/Infra. (the Infrastructure page has a disambiguation link.)
• Shell, web services, self-hosting, networking!

• framework -- laptop/company built for reparability / hackability /

• Nixos - https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-06-01-nixos-installation-declarative/

• https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

• • Nix -- let's you declaratively codify the state of a running system

nix is several things -- one of them is
it's a functional language, used for writing declarative configuration for packages, modules, files to install and services to run
several things you can use if for. 
How many things can you use it for?  Many -- in practical terms, someone needs to have written a module for it.

https://search.nixos.org/

have to write nix files

one of the best uses for nix for me (Jet), has been setting up dev environments.   nix-flaxes (dev shell feature of nix shell, plus flakes)

• nix-anywhere

• best-hits of self-hosting

why self-host

control over output 
minecraft servers
(buying hardware?)
- not necessarily -- any part of taking responsibility
can self-host on lambda -- many services 

to me, self-hosting is harder that just using a cloud provider. Unless there's a huge reason, cost.

privacy is a reason.

what value

map-reduce
media streaming -- jellyfin, video, audio -- any media.  music library. FinAmp. 
 plex server for media.
business & technology side.

photo library   - PhotoPrism -- go
file syncing, or file sharing

ollama

PeerTube 
yt-dlp
Pi-hole -- dns ad blocking, self-hosted, dns

https://www.gnod.com/ -- recommender 


Internet vs World Wide Web

AtProto -- BlueSky -- fedi-washing -- https://atproto.com/  https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

Dev Tools Git https://about.gitea.com/ https://forgejo.org/ https://radicle.xyz/

Cloud (Container) Services - Kubernetes - Podman - Docker

VPN

Tailscale -- if you have computers that you have, and you want access to, but don't want  tailscale.org

Owncast
Immich  -- PhotoPrism -- NextClod (frmr OwnCloud)
hypervisor -- proxmox, qemu/kvm, xen

https://search.feep.dev
http://marginalia.nu/

Discord alternatives? - https://revolt.chat/ - https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted - https://matrix.org/

Questions, Discussion, or Coworking

• [Issue]

For next time

Readings & Exercises

• Readings
• Exercises

Join online

• Try it yourself!
  • Join libera.chat #nb-meetup-infra

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra