Hi everyone, I posted about my Safebox project earlier, but now I’d like to hear your thoughts on something a bit broader. I’ve been noticing a pattern in self-hosting communities, and I’m curious if others see it too.
Whenever someone asks for a more beginner-friendly solution, something with a UI, automated setup, or fewer manual configs, there’s often a response like: “If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”
Sometimes it feels like a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technical side of self-hosting. I enjoy tinkering, breaking things, fixing them, learning along the way. That’s how most of us got into it.
But if we want more people to own their data, escape Big Tech, and embrace open-source alternatives, shouldn’t we welcome solutions that lower the entry barrier?
There’s room for:
- people who want full control and custom setups
- people who want semi-manual but guided
- people who want it to work with minimal friction
Just like not every Linux user compiles from source, but they’re still Linux users.
Where do you stand? Should self-hosting stay DIY only or is there value in easier, more accessible ways to self-host?
Safebox aims to make self-hosting more approachable without sacrificing data ownership, so I genuinely want your honest take before releasing it more widely.
Some technical highlights of the project, for those interested:
Safebox runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, supports both x86 and ARM64 (including Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, and others), and handles domain/subdomain setup, Let’s Encrypt certificates, DNS configuration, reverse proxy (nginx), and also offers WireGuard-based remote access.
The project is currently in beta, and we’d really appreciate feedback from anyone interested in testing it, whether it’s about usability, stability, features, design, or honestly anything at all. You can find all the info about beta testing on our Discord channel.
If you’d like to try it out, check the Github repo: https://github.com/safeboxnetwork/framework-scheduler
Website: https://safebox.network/
Discord: https://discord.gg/aBP8bz6N8J
Thanks in advance to anyone who gives it a look or shares their thoughts.
Honestly? It can’t, really. There’s some very accessible things people can do on the user side such as good password management practices, but even something as “simple” as firewall rules quickly devolves into technical stuff that most people have no idea how to deal with.
The reality is that the Internet, computers, applications are all incredibly complicated. How they interconnect is incredibly complicated, and the vast majority of people don’t even understand what an IP address is, what the function of DNS is, what a MAC address is and how it’s different than an IP address, etc. So, you can maybe point them to a guide that they can follow to set up wireguard to access their music folder when they’re out, maybe, but since every network is different, how do you make sure they’re setting it up securely without copying and pasting routes that make them less secure? You have to understand what you’re doing to be able to see if in a specific use case you’re not causing an issue.
I dunno. This is a really tough nut to crack. There’s no “guide to learning cyber security.” If you know nothing and want to learn more, you just have to learn about networking, Linux, firewalls, active directory, everything.
If you’re looking for something incremental all you’ll find is incremental learning of specific things. Like, look up the LPI Linux Essentials study guide if you want to just learn some Linux stuff. Then spin up a bunch of VMs of different distros to play with, and look at some other Linux stuff. And more Linux stuff, until you feel like you understand Linux pretty well. But, that doesn’t make you good at cyber security… Because there’s so much more than just knowing Linux. So no, there’s no incremental guide for what you’re looking for - you just have to learn many things, and you can come from whatever direction you want to start from.
If you want to learn safely then just don’t expose anything to the Internet. Keep it all local, and yeah you might introduce some insecure setups or applications, but you’re not really under any more threat of network intrusion than if you never started. That sucks though because we want to access our shit from outside the house, right? But that’s the choice, if you want to stay more secure until you’re more educated. And yeah, honestly it’s kind of undergraduate qualification level to start understanding things well enough. Sorry, that’s just the reality I think.