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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

You're somewhat unusual then, in that those who don't care, are happy with FAANG (et al) and wouldn't sign up for this due to no need.

On the other hand there are people (like myself) who are privacy focused, and the first alarm bell is who the heck are these people? They're a random company I've never heard of, hosting free software which I can (and do) host myself and offering to store all of my private, personal and/or important information for me.

Although they may very well be perfectly legitimate and caring people, how do you know their goal isn't to get as many people's data as possible and sell it off to <insert your worst nightmare here>?

This is the issue with the brand recognition problem, and I'm not sure what that target audience is that you fit into.

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You seem far more unusual than me, to be honest. Setting up your own self-hosted servers and application protocols, no thanks!

Also, you can easily find out who they are as they have an "About Us" on their website which has a "Contact" link that goes to https://www.opendesktop.org/contact

Hive01 GmbH Am Speksel 10 33649 Bielefeld Germany Contact: contact@opendesktop.org

They are also on Wikipedia and seem to have been around since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org

There, you find out that this project was started by Frank Karlitschek and is heavily involved on the KDE project, which is widely known in the Linux community.

The reason you think they have no brand recognition is that they don't have the marketing of the big cos you know about like Google and Facebook... it doesn't mean they are no-ones that cannot be trusted as you seem to be implying.

Located in Bielefeld, you say? Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy

I've considered self hosting services like that, but don't really know where to start. What do I self host it on (assuming I don't have my own data center or even a static ip), how do I make it secure, etc.?

There are a few ways to get started, it depends on your budget, what you want to host, and what you don't.

If you want something to host at home, and you have sufficient bandwidth, a Raspberry Pi (4b) can get you started relatively cheap, with an external HDD/SSD.

In terms of securing it, my recommendation would be that you don't expose your services themselves but setup a VPN you can access remotely and connect to that to use your self-hosted services. This may not always be convenient so you could expose specific services as required.

Regarding the static IP (or lack of) you'll want dynamic DNS; I wrote a (simple) tool in Golang which I can compile to run on my (Ubiquiti, mips64) router, it uses Digital Ocean's API to provide Dynamic-DNS.

If this doesn't appeal to you, a cheap $5 VPS on DigitalOcean or similar is a good place to get started too, you can use Let's Encrypt for free TLS certificates and there's plenty of help around to get started.

Check out /r/selfhosted on Reddit, they're a helpful and friendly bunch.

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