I’ve been building a project to preserve family voices, stories, photos, and history, and one question has influenced almost every design decision:
Should something this personal ever require people to trust someone else’s servers?
That’s what pushed me toward making it open source and fully self-hostable. If someone wants to keep their family’s memories on hardware they own, they should be able to.
That said, I know not everyone wants to run a server, so I’m also offering a managed hosted version. The idea isn’t to lock anyone into a platform or build another big cloud service—it simply helps fund the project for people who’d rather not manage the infrastructure themselves.
For those of you who self-host, I’m curious:
Would you actually self-host something this personal?
What would make you trust (or distrust) a project like this?
What are some mistakes you’ve seen developers make when they say they support self-hosting?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing how this community thinks about it before I finish everything up.
You can always store stuff on public datacenters for reliability in encrypted form. This also lets you break up the ZIP files into whatever size is most optimal for the connection & whatever they do with it. This might be easier for your family members to unlock since they don’t have to deal with extricating shit from storage devices. You can teach them how to unlock the ZIP files with your password while you’re still alive and shit
I do, and have printed instructions in a “When I die” sealed envelope.
But I think this is more of a people problem than a technical one. 99% of the pictures in my immich instance are of no interest to anyone else, along with most other things I back up. Some websites I’ve made I’d like to continue so have their source in github and on free hosting, but eventually the domains will expire and they’ll go away.
What you can’t provide is selecting what’s important enough to the family and what they want shared, which is the hardest part. And in some cases, that’s what people post on socials. How you want to be remembered is often just your facebook feed.
Yeah that was part of what I wanted to do too. I was thinking through that and like there’s some stories that I wouldn’t want to post on Facebook. I know there’s ways to do it where you can limit who sees it, but it’s not really easy.
I figured this would be more just for family and maybe family friends and I wanted people to be able to have their own data that is for them rather than sometimes open for anyone to see.
I don’t really store stuff like this (well, I do use immich). If I really cared about this kind of stuff, I’d probably self-host, but encrypt archives and backup to cloud storage. For small files (e.g. documents/text), I used to use Syncthing, since it was unlikely that all my devices would get destroyed at the same time, but now I just use Proton Drive since I’m already paying for email and VPN.
A project like this would need to be open source, and encryption needs to happen client-side for trust.
Docker (and in my case, TrueNAS apps), with a single data volume to backup makes things a lot easier.
Yeah I was shopping the same, but found I wanted something more specific to family, and something that would be easier for my family to setup and use. That’s the hardest part about self hosting is that sometimes it’s really hard to setup for regular users and I can’t get my family to use it. Of it’s not just a sign in button it’s too much for non-technical people
I’m trying to make sure that I have everything encrypted and secure. I just got it (I think) ready for public scrutiny [gulp]. So we will see but it is open source
