this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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FUTO just made a 14hrs long video introduction to Selfhosting! (plus a written version) πŸ’Ύ (wiki.futo.org)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Futo (Louis Rossman) at it again with great content, this time a Guide to a Self Managed life. This 14hrs long guide comes in two video parts, aswell as a written guide for those who prefer. Both video and written quide comes with complete chapters and timestamps. This should be a great starting point for those who have the time and want to start learning from the very beginning.

Video Link to Part 1: Youtube - Invidious

Video Link to Part 2: Youtube - Invidious

Happy selfhosting in 2025 everyone ✨

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[–] shakcked@lemm.ee 115 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Hey everyone in the comments complaining, this video is for me and other like me not for you. He took time to go through each step as if a complete beginner (aka me) was doing this. That means working through something as simple as downloading pfsense iso. Show me another complete guide that troubleshoots along with me and doesn't assume everything works perfectly.

He clearly states at the beginning this is not the only way to do this. He also clearly states where things could be better (pf vs OPN) but why momentum has kept him from making a change.

I'm glad y'all are at where y'all are at but this video will help win so many more people over. Having a single tutorial that takes me from zero to a selfhost solution that replicates 80% of google's everyday offering is HUGE. Is it perfect, probably not? Does it work, looks like it! And hopefully, finally getting something working will give me the confidence to implement improvements or try my own thing.

@Sips thanks for providing this as I might have missed it since it's not Rossman's channel. I was disappointed to come into the comments and see more complaints than appreciation. I've been thinking about this for a while and occasionally looking at tutorials and guides but everytime it felt like I had to piece meal all the parts to get the features I wanted. This meant troubleshooting each individual tutorial and then hoping it was completely interoperable with the next tutorial for the features/software I want. That kept me from even starting at all. Glad this exists now and knowing Rossman/Futo, it will only be improved as time goes on. Rant over.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 24 points 4 months ago

Thanks dude! Best of luck on your selfhosting adventures ✨

[–] Landless2029@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

Yep

Warning:Β This becomes a rabbit hole very quickly because there are so many items to cover. I’m not going to breadcrumb you. I want to provide you with everything, which means we have to start from the BEGINNING!

[–] abe@civv.es 32 points 4 months ago (6 children)

@Sunny@slrpnk.net There is absolutely no way any starter will see that page and not be intimidated. I am a well seasoned selfhoster and even I saw that and went "Wow that's a lotta words and images on a single page."

Even arch wiki has sensible ToC with pages divided into what the current topic is.

[–] zer0@lemm.ee 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's a possibility indeed, but at least he documented all the steps, it's great to see that because it looks like a lot of work. But I agree at the first that big long page for sure can be intimidated (CTRL+F is your best friend here).

[–] taiidan@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago

I think solely focusing on usability for "power-users" single page makes sense. Nevertheless, I think web design seems to prefer many pages though I don't know if that's driven by user-friendliness or driving up the "click-through" rate.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 8 points 4 months ago

actually yeah, fair point. I think perhaps the videoes are probably what they aim to be more beginner friendly rather than the written one.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago

Yeah, beginners are probably better served with Yunohost.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's so easy to self host! Just watch 14 hours of a talking head!

Fan of FUTO, but can't recommend this to most people thinking of starting. Needs to be less "scary".

[–] jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Agree! It can only act as a reference. I like the approach taken by distributions like Yunohost where all the details are abstracted away.

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[–] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 months ago

I've been self hosting for years, and am familiar with many of the topics here, but it's still an interesting read for things like talking about breaking out the three part router yourself. I'm really glad he out this together because it means I can see what others do in detail, even if it's NOT the 100% recommended way (OPNSense, wireguard, etc)

On one hand, I agree that having a small overview with links to make this non monolithic would go a long way to making this functional and less scary.

On the other hand some information is scattered fairly heavily. Take the switch discussion. He mentions a 15 dollar switch, and then the upper end 1000$ switch early on, to emphasize the range. It's not until a much much later section he talks about the more practical 20$ switch or 400$ switch he'd use here. So it being monolithic aides Ctrl+F to find this segmented info.

He also mentions the capability/value of having a manged switch (the latter switch is managed) specifically with VLAN, and yet doesn't to my mind ever state why/when I would do something with the switch management to that end. As far as I can tell, many newer switches will pass VLAN tags (even when unmanaged) from the router, which will enable you to offer a WAP with split SSIDs so you could use something like TP-link 8 port 2.5gb unmanged switch (which at 100$ seems like a meaningful bridge between the 15$ 4 port 1 GB switch, and $400 16 port 2.5gb, 8 port poe switch). He talks about PoE & speed merits but IMHO doesn't really cover the significance of a managed switch other than saying it had features for vlan (even though the cheapie would pass VLAN tags)

What does the managed switch offer me for VLAN? Specifically just the capability to isolate certain ports so specific hard lines are mapped to a certain vlan?

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I get how momentum keeps you on a path, and he admits that he'd rather use OPNsense in the wiki, but dammit, now he's got a bunch of other people going down the same pfSense road to the rugpull. And man, Wireguard is so much less confusing and difficult than OpenVPN, but because of the drama the pfSense weirdos made with Donnenfeld over the kernel patches for WG, there's precious little support for WG in the pfSense environment. Wireguard is definitely more noob friendly.

And if you're watching this because you need this level of help to selfhost, you definitely should not be hosting email yourself. Love Mailcow, used it for years, but I'm a veteran of the spam wars from way back and know how to deal with the current landscape. He is too, so he should know better.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 29 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Rule one of self hosting. Do not self host your own email. Only pain will you find.

You of course can, but there are so many additional hoops you have to jump through. I use my main domain for my email, but proton is one of the few subscriptions I happily pay for

[–] erev@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I selfhost my own mail server (my primary mail in fact).

My LE certs expired on Christmas eve, when I was also getting sick. I didn't realize my mail server was down for a week until about NYE. Luckily Postfix queued all my emails and there was nothing important lost, but I am reevaluating self hosting my mail server. That being said, this was also the worst issue I've faced in over a year of self hosting mail. And it only arose because my dumbass still hasn't automated my certificate rotation.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you're using let's encrypt, it's worth automating the cert renewals. Even for systems where the automation is difficult and not supported.

It's also worth running some kind of monitoring system. You can check certificates with OpenSSL really easily. Fire off a message to NTFY.

[–] erev@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I have the renewal process itself automated, just not the replacement process.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 months ago

yup, fairly normal. I had to jump through some hoops for my old haproxies

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Same principle as, "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?"

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I've been self-hosting email for so long (and ran/consulted on corporate email systems for a long time), I'm pretty sure my original domain (25 years) lends it's respectability to new domains I host at the same address. The hell of it is I host on a resi IP address and have never had a single blacklist event. I don't even know how that's possible other than the fact that I've done it for so long with no incidents that I think I'm on a whitelist or something.

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[–] Emerald@lemmy.world 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That wiki has some pretty wild quotes:

Unlike professional hosting services with static IPs, residential plans assign dynamic IP addresses that change as often as the relationship partners of people with borderline personality disorder.

[–] asbestos@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Long live futo, I hope they stay this way

[–] lps@social.trom.tf 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

@Sunny sadly in an ironic twist, they no longer seem to be maintaining their #selfhosted #peertube instance @futo_tech :(

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So they do have a PeerTube instance, just chose not to upload anything to it?

[–] lps@social.trom.tf 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@jeena they had been up until 1 mth ago, I assume it was mirrored until YouTube broken the auto syncingπŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

[–] lps@social.trom.tf 1 points 4 months ago

@jeena Thankfully I just spotted a recent upload by #louisrossman on their instance, though it seems it only includes some short videos that he put up, it's not entirely synced with their YT channel. Regarding #immich photo #peertube

peertube.futo.org/videos/watch…

@futo

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 months ago

damn, that is a shame.

[–] alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 months ago

This should be added to the Self Hosted community wiki

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Appreciate the written version, though the wiki formatting looks a little weird on mobile. The text on the table of contents is rather small.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

So why are the videos not self hosted?

[–] neo@lemmy.hacktheplanet.be 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Probably because in the current state it would not reach many people. I like PeerTube as much a the next guy but FUTO has to keep things a bit pragmatic too I imagine.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They could always upload a copy to YouTube to reach the rest also.

[–] neo@lemmy.hacktheplanet.be 2 points 4 months ago

Very true!

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Because YouTube pays Louis Rossmann, compared to selfhosting video which costs tremendous amounts of money through bandwidth.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Most of the views would be still in YouTube anyway, and those tremendous amounts are not that big because with PeerTube you share the bandwidth with other instances and even other clients (source: I'm running my own instance).

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

those tremendous amounts are not that big because with PeerTube you share the bandwidth with other instances

I have 8gbps, I'm perfectly willing to federate with Futo's instance and take some of (if not all of) the load for this video. But I don't think they peer with that many other people. At 15mbps that's about 500 people watching simultaneously.

I agree I'd like to see it on peertube for sure.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The thing is people always talk about there being not enough content on peertube but then nobody uploads their videos to it even if they have an instance. And on top of it, there is a easy way to synchronize your YouTube and PeerTube channel too if you insist to keep using YouTube for uploading, just add your YouTube channel URL to your PeerTube channel and tell it to synchronize, that's it, it will do it for you. But for some reason the self hosting YouTubers can't be bothered with that?

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 5 points 4 months ago

there is a easy way to synchronize your YouTube and PeerTube channel

No there isn't anymore. yt-dlp, what all those syncing tools rely one, is basically fucked at this point. Youtube has made it fucking impossible to grab content off their platform and it's really damn annoying. Even for my private IP address, I've earned what seems to be a permanent ban from Youtube.

Every video shows either this...

Or I login, and it only shows me the first 60 seconds of content before it just buffer loops forever

But I wouldn't want to sync the content from youtube anyway... Youtube compresses the shit out of everything.

I get your point. It's not hard for them to make a second post of the same video content to another platform. Many just don't see the value in it. I agree that at least FUTO should see the point of putting it up... Hell I'm even willing to share the load in the bandwidth (with my own instance that's currently up and running). Is what it is.

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[–] 01189998819991197253 6 points 4 months ago

I haven't finished going through all of it yet, but it seems pretty extensive and inclusive. This is great!

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