Wait, what happened here? Why is this post unlisted and flagged? cc @ph00lt0
I was about to write an answer but the content of the original post is now hidden.
Ex. In my G20 country it’s illegal for ISPs to sell personal browsing data of its users or to disclose it to other third parties without a policy warrant. An ISP can’t tell exactly what I’m doing, but yeah they can tell which sites I make requests to. I think that the need for a VPN depends entirely on your local laws and your use case. Given that browser-based fingerprinting is impossible against a sophisticated enough actor, I question whether a VPN is worth the effort given that it’ll slow down your internet, takes extra mental strain + money and is an extra party that you’ll need to trust.
We believe the opening post to be generated with AI. This is against the community guidelines and this post is under review because of that.
Greetings Ph00lt0.
I can assure you that I did not write with AI. All of the ideas and thoughts that I had written down were my own are completely original by me. I apologize that I may have written too much at once in one post, and for that I am sorry. Like I noted previously, any future posts I make here will be much more concise and focused. I was trying to keep things as clean as possible in the original post, and I did not in any way intend to spam, troll, advertise, or any other related activity that could be potentially accused. I was genuinely only trying to ask for some advice and I was only giving as much context as possible in a clean and organized way, so that there wasn’t mountains of paragraphs in that one post. Once again, I deeply apologize.
Thanks.
-DTLegit.
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Don’t worry we will take your word for it. It triggered some discussion for us so I hide it for review. Some GPT detectors classify your writing style as being AI. I hope you are not going to write a thesis this way because you might not get away with that LOL. But really don’t worry about it here. We just think it is important that people post their own thoughts to actuallly add value and not repeat it. FAQ - Privacy Guides Community
Hey there!
I think that my post might have gotten flagged because the original post that I made was most likely “too broad” and was getting too long, so they probably decided to hide it since it got answered. I’m personally not too upset by it, and I will keep any future posts I make on here more concise and focused. I apologize about that. But, with all of the responses I did get, I wanted to thank you guys for all of the help and suggestions. I’m pretty satisfied with the help as it is, so I’m not too worried.
Thanks again for everything!
Off topic
I think that this is a bit unfair if people (like me) are not native english speakers and use a tool to help them with their writing like Grammarly or alike (and those are nowadays using AI). 
So it’s either write something very poor in English or help it with a tool.
Besides that, I think that most people appreciate a good structured wall of text where things are thorough and well explained from A to Z with a deep explanation point by point.
It might be quite uncommon but some people just work this way (like me). 
Anyway, glad it’s back. 
@anon82422799 I’ll come back to you with some of my thoughts later today. 
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It is exactly why we do not rely on it and we we’re reviewing it. It was only temporarily hidden.
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You don’t specifically need “proper hardware” for most of the cool self-hostable things, it can run on the cheapest of Raspberry Pis. 
A futureproof NAS might be different, but hosting a calendar + RSS feed for example, is quite lightweight haha.
And Indeed, Immich/Ente are nice. Especially because Ente comes with Ente Auth also, so if you want to sync your own TOTP tokens, it’s also feasible that way!
Open source part
For context, I’m a webdev that did quite some contributions to Open Source as a whole.
Not a maintainer of anything particular but been in the field enough to have a good idea on how it works.
Long story short, if you have the time/resources/knowledge/capabilities to host your own thing, just do.
Don’t think that a company is friendly, has your best intents or will not lock you down, you might be quite sad down the road. There are countless companies that did that kind of meh move, this is also why I wouldn’t buy any lifetime license from anybody.
There is indeed some danger of putting all of your eggs into the basket of a solo, non-sustained dev, hence why it’s important to potentially also inspect the business model of the FOSS project you might be self-hosting.
But the more you own the thing, the better. This goes from hardware, up to software.
People need to stop renting things out, especially when the quality is not there and where the company selling the product doesn’t even care about the consumer.
You’ll also skip the need to constantly need to check the latest drama/update on the product you’re paying for if you air-gap yourself from that liability.
Donating a few bucks to your loved products can also go a long way into helping the developers.
Ofc, it’s not always a happy ending and you might be also back-stabbed by those “friendly indie devs”, but this is where due diligence from your side is needed: do your fare share of research and feel free to ask people’s opinion here.
For the rest
Yes, it will also remove some of the clutter and mess from the nonsense that might not be interested by.
I never saw you anywhere else but glad to have you on this forum!
Digital minimalism is hard in our day and age. So a phone is still required unfortunately, I guess this is where the “society” part kicks in haha. But good take on trying to reduce the amount of "smart"s in your life. 
Quite a few topics already on the forum, all in vs not have each their own pros/cons.
Myself, I recommend to stick to:
- keep the amount of services used to a minimum needed (realistically, you need a bank and an email for example)
- avoid trusting 1 entity with all of your stuff but not having 20 services that look shady and cheap/unsustainable either
- self-host as much as you realistically can while not hitting the diminishing returns wall, this should be your go-to starting point
- not being too preoccupied by the “best” and things you might be missing out. Lower your bar. You need to send emails or have events in a calendar? Stick to just that rather than having FOMO on not being able to have a fancy signature feature or some drag and duplicate for your events, keep it to a minimum useful
Actual recommendations
VPN
I’d stick to the official recommendations, you can’t really go wrong with those.
Never heard of Windscribe but I wouldn’t commit to that one specifically given how it looks and it’s probably in the “NordVPN bucket” kind of VPNs.
Tailscale is quite heavy on telemetry, but very practical and secure.
Streaming as in Netflix?
Not sure if there are huge benefits of having 2 VPNs but if you can afford that, then sure go for it (some + Proton VPN Plus sounds quite cool, not sure what is their stance on downloading Linux ISOs).
EDIT: it might actually be a bit counter-productive. 
DNS
Not a heavy user (yet maybe?) to go to the extent of paying for a service, IMO a nice free DoH like AdGuard/Mullvad is enough.
I’m quite not well aware of that topic overall, so you can just skip my opinion on this section whatsoever. 
Emails
For email services, official recos are perfect. Pick one, try it out for some time and then see if you prefer, Tuta, Proton or any other. Having your own subjective opinion here will go further than listening to our voices because it’s quite a personal thing.
If you don’t have a huge threat model with need for intense E2EE hygiene, then a thing that sends some text back is forth is all you need. Keep it simple and pick your favorite UX.
Calendars + Contacts
Most of the email services come with that part too.
I would personally not self-host the email part, but calendars and contacts definitely could be self-managed.
Depends mostly on your use cases and if you need to share calendars or have something fancy. If no, having Radicale and pairing it with Davx5 is by far the most no-BS get’s the job done way to go.
Plenty of other choices to solve such a simple problem. No need for crazy infrastructure for some events linked to dates and some numbers tied to people.
Cloud
You know my take on this one already: self-host and get yourself UnRaid/TrueNAS for the best performance/price/ownership ratio.
Because most cloud drives (at least the ones I tried) do not make it easy to have a simple WebDAV/SSHFS access across devices. Either they are restricted because of specific clients of for security reasons.
If all you need is to host some backups or dump some big files, you can stick to AWS S3/Backblaze B2/any other S3-compatible config and either use standards tools or wrappers like Cyberduck/Mountain Duck if you need some kind of GUI to make it more simple to use.
If you are uploading sensitive documents, you can integrate to those locations with Cryptomator to have it encrypted there.
Password manager
Here I am a bit more extreme than the average person I think but I keep it simple: Keepass.
Works on every device[1], is offline and I absolutely do not trust any company with my passwords.
Also would never pay for such a service.
It’s not as practical for sure, but I take the bullet on that one. Tradeoff is fine for me.
Otherwise…Vaultwarden, it is more powerful but also more complex to maintain rather than a basic .kdbx file.
Choose your favorite flavor (keepass VS warden):
- simple VS feature-rich
- offline VS online
- single file VS Docker container with DBs/etc…
Aliasing
SimpleLogin is honestly awful[2].
Addy is just superior (especially the UX) by a LONG shot. It’s almost fun to create aliases there, in comparison to the chore that is SimpleLogin…
Also, you can get a gift card if you want a perfect anonymity there.
Finally, not having it included in Proton is fine, it’s not a 20$/m subscription or anything.
Search
Brave or DuckDuck are plenty enough for me too.
Search engines are awful nowadays anyway, so if I can’t find anything with those, I need some other kind of google-fu as a whole.
Maybe I’m missing out on something HUGE with Kagi, but idk.
AI
If you’re looking to have your own local models, you can probably ask for some advice on here: https://discuss.huggingface.co/
Otherwise, I’d check if maybe one of your current subscriptions/services have an available AI subscription already. It will probably be far more “powerful” than your self-hosted FOSS model one.
I honestly do that for queries that I am very comfortable asking in public (I assume I have 0% privacy), like:
- “OpenWRT WPA3 support”
- “Strapi 5, how to Content Manager find by”
nothing personal or sensitive. Again, only asking for things that I’m fine asking to anybody in public.
Data removal
I’m in EU so my situation is a bit different. But I’d recommend EasyOptOuts given the success ratio as explained in the official reco.
Browsers
They are all bad but you can always mix and match according to what you prefer.
Personally, I do use:
- Vanadium on my Pixel with GrapheneOS
- Brave as a basic b*tch quick and dirty for work stuff on desktop/work phone (syncing them together)
- LibreWolf for a secondary sidekick because it’s nice to have some different extensions for debugging my developer code stuff
- Mulvad/Tor for extra private stuff when needed
Notes
Simple:
- Zettelkasten? then Obsidian (closed-source but infinitely more powerful)
- anything else, then pick whatever FOSS tool
Photos
Self-hosted Immich or self-hosted Ente (coming with Photos and Auth).
Read the docs, try both and see which one you personally prefer the most. 
It is quite a personal thing as a whole and depends on your needs.
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Regarding the messages from my buddies above:
- don’t overwhelm yourself indeed, good/better is always nicer than perfect
- I also recommend moving to GrapheneOS
- if you don’t want to hop, consider choosing simple low-maintenance tools and self-hosting them yourself (a calendar is a calendar at the end of the day, doesn’t need to be update weekly)
Obsidian [...] there is no free sync, there is a self-hostable sync tool- flashy websites like Windscribe (for example) doesn’t inspire a lot of trust overall, I’d rather have something very boring and less g5M4r like IVPN’s website
- indeed, don’t make it complex and stick to only 1 password manager, security is not about complexity
- having Proton visionary indeed puts you in a closed ecosystem box, this is why I tend to discourage from buying expensive lifetime options or alike
- you might lose quite some benefits if you part away but at the same time: do you want to stay with Proton (if they go south in the future) just because it’s “cheaper” for you?
I love Mullvad VPN [but...] 5 device limits, considering fixing this by using some OpenWRT router with a VPN to cover all of your LAN under “1 device” itself- and link all of your devices with some Tailscale/Netbird/Wireguard
- if something is not recommended here, it indeed doesn’t (automatically) make it a bad choice[1]
- don’t overthink it and start somewhere, you can always fine-tune it down the road
- especially if you don’t need to do any kind of scorched earth reset
- especially if you don’t need to do any kind of scorched earth reset
this is especially relevant for self-hosting ↩︎
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It’s not.
Summary
It doesn’t include analytics, nor deceptive pricing and advertising, their clients are open source, requires zero personal information, has better transparency and not funded by venture capital funds.
Ethics and Philosophy - Windscribe
omg. Is that what we’re doing here? Just writing essays to each other? 
I think you read my previous post here to know that this is the one thing I disagree on the most. I feel like this is inviting users (a new user in this case btw) to become system administrators. To me this is a super advanced topic that virtually no one should do imo. Why? Consider:
- your home network will have a dynamic IP (unless you’re also paying for home “business” internet for a static IP). How is a new user going to manage that? Note: I’ve used a free service called duckdns before to manage my local home assistant IP-to-DNS binding, but it was quite unstable, which resulted in major wife aggro for myself. Perhaps there are better solutions or you’ll need to pay or automate a solution yourself? Too complex imo.
- self hosting means you’ll likely need to figure out port forwarding. Not super complex sure.
- opening up your local servers to the world will increase your system’s attack surface to hackers. You’ll now need to consider security of your system.
- For example, if you live in Scandinavia, but go on vacation to Hawaii, you’ll notice that your self-hosted solutions will take much longer to contact. Not the end of the world, but something that hosted/pro companies take care of for you via CDNs.
- What happens if you’re out but your internet and/or electricity goes out? Or what happens if your house with all your self hosted equipment burns down? You lose access to all your self hosted stuff indefinitely. We’re now jumping into the topic of building redundancy and backups and you did mention this with your AWS S3 paragraph, but I think this is once again way too complex for virtually all users out there.
^ I understand that none of the things I listed here are necessarily deal breakers by themselves, but they do add more friction, maintenance and mental strain to the process. I believe that 99% of the users here just want to improve their privacy and not become system admins. This is why I would never recommend self hosting to anyone and it should be the type of avenue that a user naturally explores when they’re ready.
Psst, I know a guy that runs a FOSS project to make this all very easy: https://github.com/lone-cloud/gerbil Much better experience than the PG-recommended KoboldCpp that, that project still uses as a backend for local LLM inference, but I digress.
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I asked OP if they were even willing to do so just before writing my thing to try the waters haha.
To answer your points:
- not everything has a dynamic IP, most ones in Netherlands (or France) do not for example
- there are better solutions than duckDNS too, it’s not an unsolved problem as a whole, it might add some friction if you’re concerned
- port forwarding is the same, handled by a few tools (read below
) - opening to the world is an issue yes, but this is where tools like Tailscale can help you out having your own small bubble without opening anything to the outside world
- with NAT traversal and all the intricacies related to security, that you now don’t need to worry about anymore
- with NAT traversal and all the intricacies related to security, that you now don’t need to worry about anymore
- if I live in Scandinavia and go on holidays to Hawaii, I’m fine having a 60ms ping rather than 2ms, again a non-issue (degraded experience yes, but still works)
- does it justify paying a services for those extra latency hurdles? that is for everybody to decide
- if your Internet or electricity goes out:
- first, that’s a big if: I do have this like twice a year (I work from home 24/7, hence can tell immediately) hence not an often thing, here at least
- if it is the case, some things might still work for example you will still be able to access your photos locally (even if they’re not syncing to Ente), having local-first apps that are enhanced by Internet connectivity is indeed a prio on my list (why having a calendar that can work ONLY if online?
) - if my house is flooded/burning, you know: it’s not a big deal if I cannot access my Jellyfin instance for a given day while being out, not a BIG deal
Also, I gave a nuanced perspective where I advised to either use offline[1] tools like Keepass and still pay for services like email. Some of them are more critical than others.
I for example wouldn’t recommend self-hosting some VoIP if you’re running a business based on that or need to be highly available. But if you’re not and want to be hella-anonymous, I could recommend self-hosting your own SimpleX server for example because that might not be an operational-blocker in case it goes down.
Btw, you had a lot of ifs in your reply.
Now my turn.
What happens if the company hosting your data get’s NUKED and all of their replicas are targeted at the same time? 
Yeah, we can go a long way with ifs. 
One thing is for sure, using a service is a convenience and it works.
Another thing that’s sure is: you will never have any guarantee that if you want to opt out from their service, that they will actually delete your data. Might just flip a toggle and hide your account.
I actually very much doubt that any company actually deletes stuff from their database, it’s just too precious to have a permanent record for a lot of reasons. It’s precious overall.
But, if you never give it in the first place, that’s a non-problem.
Speaking of non-problems, having some down time with your homelab[2] might not be a big deal. Just don’t build a house of cards where your entire thing will stun-lock you if it’s down.
You said stun-lock? Oh yeah, like when ENTIRE businesses/companies are being unable to do anything at all because Cloudflare/Github/Slack/AWS/whatever are down? Oh yeah, I had that thrice this month myself.
So yes, the topic of privacy / decentralization / high-availability is a huge topic I do very much agree on this one.
Meanwhile, from a privacy POV: everybody could benefit a lot from playing around and having their own stuff hosted at home. Especially when you realize that you don’t NEED a service for your calendars, movies or whatever you’re monthly paying for.
You know what adds friction? When cloud services pull the rug and remove features.
Or when they lock it down remotely for something that you paid rented from them.
You spend time researching the product, then you buy it, then it works, but then it breaks again and you need to redo the loop again.
OR, you could spend some time learning the thing, struggling to configure it properly but then if it works at some point, it’s a “forget it”, with no company drama or nonsense.
Pros and cons to both cloud services and self-hosted for sure.
Privacy was never really about convenience anyway, we would not have companies making money otherwise.
This is also why I started by asking if OP wanted to give it a try.
If that was way above their head, I would have just skipped my entire FOSS/self-hosted speech. But looks like they are not against it.
I will always stand by the fact that being tech-savvy[3] beats any kind of FUD spread by influencers/governments/alike. Nothing beats being educated and building your own things. 
If you’d rather pay for a fish rather than learn how to fish 
yourself sure, go for it.
But if you can/want/have the time, oh hell yeah, even better! 
The little FOSS project looks definitely fancy[4].
or at least, offline-first ↩︎
PG for example is now decentralized over clusters, but it wasn’t always like that I assume. Before, I think it wasn’t a big deal if the server was down for a few hours hence you could also start small initially and polish the experience down the road to make it more resilient/robust given your needs. While if you gave all of your stuff to a cloud service, it is too late to go back and retract your stuff from them ↩︎
either by understanding your tools, by learning how to code or just hacking around with the things in your code is a net positive for Humanity ↩︎
even if it’s using dem doomed JS ecosystem haha
↩︎
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Hey there Kissu!
I apologize about replying a little late here. Thanks for the response!
Quick follow-ups if you don’t mind:
-
Radicale + DAVx5, native Proton Calendar/Contacts, and Posteo- Are there any tradeoffs or strong preferences between those three?
-
Would Addy still be worth it if Proton Pass already includes SimpleLogin?
From what I have read here, I think that you are definitely right in regards to what you have said about buying lifetime packages.
Thanks! I think that this might be what I will be doing eventually. I personally have been finding self-hosting to actually be very fun and interesting, and I would be interested in learning how to run and administer my own network and Linux servers. I have watched some self-hosting/IT YouTube channels like WunderTech and Lawrence Tech Systems and I have learned a lot from those guys.
Yeah, I think Proton + Mullvad is what I’ll probably end up going with, and cancel PIA and Windscribe.
I’m still kind of tied between that and ControlD, but as you said I think that you are right that I am likely better off with just using Quad9/Mullvad DNS for free when I am not using a VPN’s native DNS and am outside of my local network. Perhaps I’ll use PiHole/Adguard Home when I am in my local network for DNS ad-blocking.
Alright, I will definitely give those a look and check them out as well! I know that JG recommended Posteo as a DavX5 option as well, with also of course probably Proton having native contacts and calendar syncing as well. Thanks for that!
Nextcloud AIO looks really awesome!
I like KeePass/KeePassXC and I do find it to be very nice and simple. I will likely use this for both password vault backups and for my most sensitive logins. I’ll look into Vaultwarden as well.
Alright. Thank you so much!
Agreed. I will probably trade Kagi Ultimate for DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. I might perhaps subscribe to Brave Search Premium to help support the search engine, as I think it’s nice that their search index is independent and to use it ad-free.
Basically, Kagi is fully ad-free and doesn’t rely on any contextual ads at all like Brave Search and DuckDuckGo both do. Also has some really interesting features like a customizable search algorithm, custom lenses, and bangs.
Nice! For cloud-based AI, I’m considering giving NanoGPT another go, since it was something JG has suggested. For local AI, I agree that Hugging Face does look really nice. I think that is the LLM repository that both LMStudio and GPT4All pull from.
I currently am using DuckDuckGo Info Removal and have signed up for EasyOptOuts. EEO seems to do a better job at catching sites than DDG, so I might end up just cancelling it and go all in with EOO then.
I’ll just pick the least worse ones probably then. Probably going to keep things simple and go with one Firefox-based and one Chromium-based, and use for different purposes. LibreWolf and Mullvad look like really good FF-based browsers. Waterfox also looks interesting.
Immich and Ente do both look cool. I am strongly considering Ente, just due to how I like that it does on-device ML/AI image processing instead of relying on the server side for that like how Immich does. But both look like excellent projects. Ente Auth and Aegis look like cool options on the authenticator side of things.
Thanks a lot for the help and suggestions! You gave me a lot to consider here. I hope that you have a good one!
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No issues regarding late reply given my delay haha.
For Radicale VS others, it always comes down to:
- do you trust a company X or Y enough?
- can/do you want to do it yourself?
- might be annoying at first but then you’d be done with it for potentially ever? besides small updates here and there because it’s not a critical piece of software
I’d personally pick Radicale > Proton > Posteo. But I never heard of Posteo ever before so yeah, doesn’t help but it is meanwhile still a company (even if a potentially good one). 
Addy is just better and again, it’s 1 or 3€/m, not breaking the bank all things considered.
I tried both, fine paying the premium of Addy even if I had a premium Proton account.
Makes me very happy to read this message. 
Yeah, this is how it should be anyway! 
Until people get you into buying expensive 10GbE switches and Ubiquiti gear.
Very much the same sir. 
But we should stop watching and getting our hands more dirty tbh, practice is better than theory! 
You could always bring your home with you outside with Tailscale/Netbird.
Even if it feels good to see you agree to my take 
, consider also other opinions.
I myself haven’t tried Kagi Ultimate so, make your own opinion.
This has pros and cons, because at the end of the day your homelab server might (should?) be more powerful. But anyway, it is indexed only once. Or at least, you probably don’t dump 5k photos every week hence even if you do, it is still a background process. Once done, it is indexed and doesn’t really impact anything when reading from the index (by typing “cat” in the search bar for example). 
Have a good one too! 
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I was absolutely shocked to read the topic starter’s post. This guy installed a huge amount of software on his device (expanding his attack surface to unimaginable proportions), hoping to protect himself for the rest of his life. I would advise him to reduce his choice of privacy tools from three and more to one for each.
OP is not using all of those at the same time but tried a bunch to see which ones fits the best. Always better than sticking to only one and never trying anything else.
I appreciate your reply!
Since you’re trying to build a long term setup it’d be a great idea to carefully choose your hardware.
I checked this thread and “hardware choice” hasn’t really been discussed much at all… 
There are many viable hardware choices for self-hosting such as Raspberry Pi, NAS, mini-PC, or any old PC/laptop if you don’t want to buy new hardware (or you can buy them used). If you don’t have space for hardware, you can rent a VPS. With self-hosting, it’s more important to learn how to do so securely.
It’s not the same as smartphones where there’s only two clear choices for security. And for those who can’t get a Google Pixel or iPhone, then whatever the best phone they can get with their budget.