The self-hosting journey continues

Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.

As a long-time Fedora user, I just wanted to share for anyone who’s either hosting a Matrix server or participating on one and would like a really slick app, you should check out Spectral. It’s not in the repos (and unfortunately most of the other cool apps only have Ubuntu packages), but thanks to recent events giving us the cross-distro Flatpak standard, you can install it that way. Just go to the Spectral Flathub page and follow the instructions. Unlike some of the other, boring looking apps, it looks just as slick (if not moreso) as the Riot.im/app :

• Ampache
• Google
• Google-Hangouts
• Google-Music
• Google-Reader
• Matrix
• Slack
• Ttrss