Nextcloud in 2025: How 25 Million Users Escaped Big Tech's Data Prison “Nextcloud powers 400,000+ servers worldwide, giving organizations like the German federal government complete control over their data while escaping Big Tech surveillance. Discover why millions choose open-source collaboration over Microsoft and Google's data-mining platforms.” “Today, ITZBund operates Nextcloud for 300,000 employees across the German federal government. The French Ministry of Interior runs it for their 300,000 staff. Schleswig-Holstein deploys it across 25,000 systems. Swedish federal agencies, Dutch ministries, universities across Europe, hospitals, law firms, and millions of home users rely on Nextcloud for file storage, video conferencing, document collaboration, email, calendars, and now AI assistance. These organizations discovered they could have enterprise-grade collaboration tools while maintaining complete control over every byte of their data. No surveillance capitalism. No vendor lock-in. No data held hostage in Silicon Valley.” NextCloud actually has way more functionality inside it than MS Office will ever have. But the real point is you have ownership and control over your services as well as your data. But what about AI? For better or worse, AI now comes in a lot of applications. Nextcloud Assistant 3.0 also brings AI agency features to everyone, and not just those who pay for OpenAI. It is supposedly more than just chatbot functionality. It's true too though that apart from data sovereignty and cost savings of around 50-80% you will also miss out on Microsoft license audits, and surprise price hikes (remember Microsoft moving from per CPU licensing to per core licensing). See https://doingfedtime.com/nextcloud-in-2025-how-25-million-users-escaped-big-techs-data-prison #technology #opensource #selfhosting #datasovereignty

Navidrome is an open source web-based music collection server and streamer Navidrome gives you freedom to listen to your music collection from any browser or mobile device. It's like your personal Spotify! It handles very large music collections, will stream virtually any audio format available, and reads and uses all your beautifully curated metadata. Furthermore, it has full support for playlists, with option to auto-import .m3u files and to keep them in sync. Additionally, it can also work as a lightweight Subsonic-API compatible server, that can be used with any Subsonic compatible client. This means there are a number of additional client apps that will also work with it. They also have a demo site where you can try it out. See

GitHub

GitHub - navidrome/navidrome: 🎧☁️ Your Personal Streaming Service

🎧☁️ Your Personal Streaming Service. Contribute to navidrome/navidrome development by creating an account on GitHub.

#technology #opensource #selfhosted #music

How to Keep Containers Up-to-Date with What’s Up Docker (WUD) This looks really promising over both Watchtower and DIUN. It takes a bit more tweaking to get to where you want to be, but some key highlights that I really like about WUD are: * Plenty of docker container labels and environmental settings * Being able to custom name any specific docker image with `wud.display.name: Maria DB` label in the docker compose file for the container * Being able to just watch the major, minor, and patch version changes with the 'wud.tag.include' label * Being able to set a changelog link per image with the 'wud.link.template' label (although this is a pain to set up) * Being able to actually trigger an update from within WUD's GUI with the prune and auto settings set All past solutions up to now have been really messy with notifications not really pointing you to exactly which image is ready for updating (when you have three Postgres database images) but WUD is zooming straight into which one/s are ready to update. Once I bed down what is working well, I may do a video about WUD in the near future. See a how-to at

Linuxiac

How to Keep Containers Up-to-Date with What’s Up Docker (WUD)

Learn how to automate Docker container updates using What’s Up Docker (WUD) to get notified and keep your images fresh.

and their GitHub project at

WUD

WUD (aka What

#technology #docker #selfhosting #opensource

How to set up a self-hosted newsletter using listmonk “Listmonk is an amazing feature packed self-hosted email newsletter manager. It offers loads of features like analytics (clicks, opens, bounces), templates, public subscription pages, importing subscribers and much more!” Listmonk is not perfect, as it cannot by default trigger from an RSS feed (although there is a GitHub-based workaround) and it does still need to connect to a mail service. The latter could be a pro or a con, as it certainly gives flexibility and can for example connect to a free service like Gmail. It does track opening of mails, mail bounces, etc and whilst some may not like this, the point is it is the individual sending the newsletter who tracks and acts on this. It is not some 3rd party corporate who is doing who knows what else with the addresses or embedded tracking. I started using a “free” mailing subscription service, and I am regretting it now, as I'm getting suspicious of the embedding I did on my website to get it working (this after I removed Google tracking and other similar services). I do like that listmonk offers the basics of having to actively opt into a mailing list, there are easy opt out options, wiping of user data, and it does all the basics most probably need. The pain though is sometimes finding a good mailing service you don't have to pay for. Good one's, for example Proton, don't allow this type of functionality. Interestingly, too, I see listmonk can connect using HTTP webhooks to send SMS, Whatsapp, FCM notifications, or any type of messages in fact. So, I'll be looking into this open source offering in future to migrate my own mailing list. See

How to setup a selfhosted newsletter using listmonk | 4rkal's Dev Blog

Listmonk is an amazing feature packed selfhosted email newsletter manager. It offers loads of features like analytics (clicks, opens, bounces), tem...

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #maillists

Speedtest-Tracker is a self-hosted Internet Performance Dashboard “Do you keep tabs on how much your network speed varies day to day? What about hour by hour? With this simple Docker container, you can not only automatically monitor your network performance, but also view it in a gorgeous graph with the click of a button.” This can be pretty useful to see what your Internet connection performs like normally, and to show when things have gone wrong. See

How-To Geek

This Docker Container Turned My NAS Into an Internet Performance Dashboard

Do you monitor your internet speed?

#technology #speedtest #selfhosted #opensource

Immich Public Proxy shares your Immich photos and albums safely without exposing your Immich instance to the public Immich is a wonderful bit of software, but since it holds all your private photos it's best to keep it fully locked down. This presents a problem when you want to share a photo or a gallery with someone. To view a shared album in Immich, you need access to the /api/ path. If you're sharing a gallery with the public, you need to make that path public. Any existing or future vulnerability has the potential to compromise your Immich instance. I'm not aware of any such vulnerability existing right now. Immich Public Proxy provides a barrier of security between the public and Immich, and only allows through requests which you have publicly shared. It is stateless and does not know anything about your Immich instance. It does not require an API key which reduces the attack surface even further. The only things that the proxy can access are photos that you have made publicly available in Immich, and it strips out most metadata such as locations, camera details, comments, etc. This video will show how it operates and give some pointer son setting it up, and will also show a workaround I'm using to provide a public landing page for all your shared links on Immich, and how to nest a group of sub-albums on a webpage. See #technology #opensource #security #Immich

Europe plots escape hatch from the enshittification of search “If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls “It has 14 partners funding it so firstly enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance. It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index.” Nevertheless, this does look very interesting. It has 14 partners funding it, so hopefully that means it won't just run out of steam in a few months, and also means there should not be any single corporation just calling all the shots. It also says it aims not to provide a search API, but rather it is shared as open data so that others use it in building a search engine. But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as the web is changing daily, so this all has to come together and bring meaningful search results to end users. So, I guess we'll only be able to tell when such search engines are established and many people have actually tested and evaluated the results. See

OpenWebSearch – a European index for European search engines

: Plus: How to make Google less unhelpful

#technology #opendata #search

This is probably what desktop Linux needed: PewDiePie installs Linux His video has hit over 4 million views in just 2 days. Most videos about desktop Linux are done by passionate techies, and they just don't tend to sway or influence most ordinary desktop OS users. What Linux has probably long needed is a few real “non-tech” celebrities to promote it more. PewDiePie is one of the last people I'd have ever expected to install Linux, let alone to dive into some of the depths that he did. I've watched a few commentary videos today by some popular tech channels, and they are all very complimentary about the tech content he covered. No-one is faulting him on anything he mentioned in his video. He made a very entertaining, but also very informative video. It is clear that PewDiePie is not as superficial as I thought him to be. This is no basic installation that he did, and certainly most beginners are better off just installing Linux Mint and taking it slowly from there. His timing is probably really spot-on, too, given the looming deadline for the cessation of support for Windows 10 later this year. See #technology #Linux #PewDiePie #opensource

7 network security myths that make you less secure Number 5 interested me specifically as I recently installed Zenarmor to monitor my network from the inside using packet inspection. It demonstrated point 5 quite well in showing what the apps on mobile phones actually get up to in the background. I did a post a day or two back about that one ad-tracking app that tries to push lots of information out, but Zenarmor identified and blocked it. The point is, we have phones and desktop computers behind the firewall that are installing sometimes suspect applications. The apps can scan networks, can watch keystrokes, report location, and lots more. It is not wise to think the firewall is just keeping everything out, when we have brought these apps inside, and they are calling out with data. Your firewall may block all inbound traffic, but various apps, IoT devices, cameras, open their own pipes to the outside world. Even worse, some still have their default admin and password as their login credentials. So, the linked article is good food for thought. One has to think a bit deeper than just the main router, and especially if you are sitting with a default router that your ISP gave you for free with your Internet service. If your router is no longer getting firmware updates (you do update it regularly, don't you?) then you should be thinking about replacing it. My own case is a bit more exposed, as I host some services from home. My post a few months back, after I had installed OPNsense as the firewall, showed the constant barrage of hits from outside against the firewall. 99.9% of this is all automated, so no-one is worried about whether your setup is a juicy target or not, as everything gets hit from outside today. See

XDA

7 network security myths that make you less secure

It's time to put some network security myths to rest.

#technology #security #networking

SmokePing is a cross-platform open source deluxe latency measurement tool SmokePing can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a long term data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up-to-the-minute information on the state of each network connection. Its Main Features are: * Measures latency as well as latency variation. * Wide variety of probes, ranging from simple ping to web requests and custom protocols. * Advanced alarm system, triggering on configurable 'latency patterns'. * Master/slave deployment model to run measurements from multiple sources in parallel. * Ajax based graph navigation. * Chart mode, to show the most interesting graphs first * Plug-able probes, alarms (matchers) and charting function. * Written in Perl for easy expandability. * Fully documented. But whilst it is really feature packed, it is a pretty steep learning curve to just get going, compared to say the proprietary Windows version of PingPlotter that I used many years ago. I'd say the Docker install of SmokePing is maybe a trifle easier, as the config files etc are a bit more standard than the various flavours of Linux install (the AUR install was putting config files in a different place for me). However, if you do want a more of a PingPlotter alternative, there is also Pingnoo for Linux that is as easy as PingPlotter to get going and shows traceroute as well. See

SmokePing - About SmokePing

#technology #opensource #networking