Self-Hosting

Someone shared this cool site on Hacker News: https://knock-knock.net/.

It’s a honey pot with the purpose of identifying malicious actors on the internet and then publicly sharing the list of their IP addresses.

Since I’m hosting my own site, I’ve seen how many bots are hitting my poor server. Number one on the list of 404 errors is a request to /wp-admin/install.php?step=1 – 10 times as many hits as the next entry. It’s clearly an attempt to pwn web servers whose careless admins left an uninitialized WordPress instance exposed to the internet.

A few weeks ago, I saw two interesting talks on Tübix. One was about self-hosting an e-mail server with Stalwart, and another was about digital sovereignty in Europe – or at least the first half of it, then it turned into a bit of a rant about the state of the usability of FOSS.

The message in both talks matched the sentiment that can be felt in many circles these days: digital sovereignty is becoming more important than ever. Dependence on (usually US American) hyperscalers should be avoided. This resonates with me.