Shortcut: use Tailscale to create your own private network and avoid hosting on the big, bad Internet. Otherwise, you really have to be careful on how you protect your services.
Minor downside (or upside) is that you’ll have to install the Tailscale app on each device you want to make part of the network.
This made hosting at home a lot easier for me.
Update: Ah! I misread the post. Tailscale doesn’t make sense for this use case. My bad! 😅
Well, that was disappointing. I guess that explains why he deleted his Mastadon account recently.
Forgejo
I believe https://codeberg.org/ is a hosted Forgejo instance. It has a more familiar UI, similar to GitHub.
Although, they have restrictions on the types of projects they’re willing to host.
Create a new repo locally.
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
Then to create a new remote repo, you can do this.
git remote add origin [email protected]:~user/my-new-repo
git push origin main
You’ll get a message that says.
remote:
remote: NOTICE
remote:
remote: You have pushed to a repository which did not exist. ~user/my-new-repo
remote: has been created automatically. You can re-configure or delete this
remote: repository at the following URL:
remote:
remote: https://git.sr.ht/~user/my-new-repo/settings/info
Interesting! I didn’t realize this! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
So it seems like the FSF does this in order to be able to enforce GPL. Buuut, these guys really gotta be the exception. I feel like the probability of the FSF selling out and going full corporate evil is pretty low…
a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
That’s exactly the problem though. The project owning the code, instead of the contributors owning the code.
I don’t think the type of license matters too much if you have to sign a CLA, since the company can just change it whenever they want. For example, you can be AGPL today (Joplin) and then not AGPL tomorrow.
The Thunderbird desktop app for Linux has a “Export to Mobile” feature. It generates a QR code that you can scan on your phone to, I guess (I haven’t tried it), transfer the login info of your email accounts from desktop to phone. After that, IMAP should take care of syncing the emails from the server to each device.
Seems like the owners of Gitea did something like a self-coup and kicked out community members from the project. https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/
Forgejo is the community-driven fork of Gitea.
People like to act like Docker containers and environment variables are simple. But so often these things are not.
Oh for sure. I hate it when apps are like “EZ one line install” but then spin up a bunch of Docker containers. It’s just more potential for shit to break.
A huge reason I like Navidrome is because it’s just a single static Go binary. Can’t get much easier to manage than that. Plus a bunch of native music apps are available as well. Wish more software was like that.
For the specific case I’m talking about (CLAs), I check if the project (on GitHub or wherever) requires signing a CLA to contribute. In Joplin’s case, they do:
Basically, with a CLA they can change the license at any time to whatever they want. If they want to go closed source tomorrow they can with zero trouble. Without a CLA, they would need approval from everyone who has contributed to the project to do a license change, giving the project proper open source protections.
One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying “Your secure, open-source note-taking companion”. I guess that’s technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)
They even say so explicitly:
This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so
— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
And fine, if they want to do that it’s up to them. I’d just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.
Hosted apps means you can use them on multiple devices. Otherwise, I have to wait until I get home, power up my laptop, wait for the OS to boot, wait for the app to load, then do the thing I wanted to do.
Any thoughts on how to solve the data sync problem without hosting? I guess I remember some apps doing a local network sync to get data to multiple devices. I kinda remember having problems with that not working all the time…
Yeah, you’re right. Bad advice actually. Oops.