I'm the CEO of a machine learning training company. I'm just getting into self hosting (nodebb).

This started with me reading Farnell's 'Digital vegan' and then HN discussing a post I made on geminispace telling how Tiktok recommended me a video of my son... with the interesting twist that neither my son nor me had a Tiktok account.

I'm a ML practitioner (20yrs) in the field so I know how the sausage is made. But this woke me up to work harder on degoogling myself, and potentially stop using a smartphone.

I'll be lurking in this forum before contributing, if you don't mind.

@mehdi

HN Thread

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@marcusquinn some instructions on how to selfhost logseq; https://github.com/dustinlacewell/logseq-guide
I'd love for it to be included on cloudron.

There's a huge community and this could be a stepping stone for cloudron to be more popular.

@jdaviescoates oh gosh, how embarrassing. Typo, it's 'unstuckphd.com' Thanks so much!

@girish Thanks, it seems all is working now.
Thanks to everyone who saved the day

@jdaviescoates I would love to have it too, more so because the current alternative we do have, calibre, doesn't seem to work stable.

@luckow Thanks so much. I got postmark to work. I'm happy something works now so I can move to more important topics Email was not in my mind something that could cause this much trouble.

@BrutalBirdie said in Nodebb reported to be buggy. Not having control over cloudron's release pace could be a problem!:

Here is a screenshot of one my main cloudrons availability report for my company with all internal tools for this year so far.

That's amazingly detailed. It shows you are a pro with servers. And that you really care about keeping things running. Which is not something I am or want to be. I'm a businessman nowadays and while I love to solve tech problems every now and then, it's not a good use of my time. I really believe selfhosting is a better way to deal with technology (and it foments freedom from bigTech), but the price of admission is too high at the moment for me.

@girish I know, it's a terribly hard to fix problem (supporting plugins).
I don't have a solution. It's just that in my case I have to weight in this and make a decision.
Either nodebb without plugins, or do not self host.

Interesting, never thought it would come to this

@BrutalBirdie said in Nodebb reported to be buggy. Not having control over cloudron's release pace could be a problem!:

Here is a screenshot of one my main cloudrons availability report for my company with all internal tools for this year so far.

That's amazingly detailed. It shows you are a pro with servers. And that you really care about keeping things running. Which is not something I am or want to be. I'm a businessman nowadays and while I love to solve tech problems every now and then, it's not a good use of my time. I really believe selfhosting is a better way to deal with technology (and it foments freedom from bigTech), but the price of admission is too high at the moment for me.

First, I really appreciate cloudron. What it does is really amazing; a quantum jump from any other solution. I would not selfhost without it.

I have a nodebb forum that just silently broke when I wanted to remove the quill plugin. It seems the current nodebb version is buggy:
https://sudonix.com/topic/275/moving-away-from-the-quill-js-plugin/7

This brings me to the topic: do we get the latest version of everything (within reason)? Is anyone tracking whether that version is reportedly buggy? With my desktop OS, manjaro, I check the forums before they dump a big update. I install it a few days after I've seen the issues reported on the forums' "stable update" channel. I imagine there will be similar things for most of the apps cloudron supports.

We self-hosters probably cannot afford a devops person (let alone team). If a new version of an app gets published to cloudron, and borks a public production site, there's absolutely nothing we can do other than revert to a backup. This situation makes me uneasy. I want to have peace of mind more than I want to be independent and self-hosting!

Anyone thinking the same? What's your take? How much of your week goes to babysitting things that break with updates when you self host (even with cloudron)? I'm starting to feel this could be an uncomfortably high number.

@jdaviescoates I would love to have it too, more so because the current alternative we do have, calibre, doesn't seem to work stable.

@marcusquinn some instructions on how to selfhost logseq; https://github.com/dustinlacewell/logseq-guide
I'd love for it to be included on cloudron.

There's a huge community and this could be a stepping stone for cloudron to be more popular.

@nebulon Great app, an improvement over any wiki we have on cloudron now

What are the pros and cons of using surfer compared to sites for static hosting like netlify, vercel or render?

I'm guessing with surfer you don't have a CDN, which could be important. I'm planning to host the company site (converted to static) soon.

I haven't even installed surfer yet

@scooke good point. When I say 'working' I mean simply that emails are getting sent (throug apps in cloudron, in particular nodebb) and they land outside the spam folder.

@girish Thanks, it seems all is working now.
Thanks to everyone who saved the day

@scooke thanks, I know it can be frustrating to help someone who is trying too many things at the same time and who doesn't want to read the abundant docs everywhere. Email does feel like a black box. Right now there are MX records from titan.email (which I bought from name.com when I got the domain). I can remove those. But then how do I check test emails? I take what you mean is that I should use one of the cloudron webmail apps?

This is what I have on my DNS (name.com) for that domain:

However, what is receiving your email? If you are using Cloudron to manage your email, it doesn't make sense to use an external SMTP

Who is receiving email: gmail accounts for testing (2 gmail, one gsuite) and one titan.email for good measure.
Problem is that when I used cloudron with no relay, email did not arrive to anything but spam. As recommended here, I tried to mark as 'not spam' and reply to these emails, but that didn't solve the problem. It might be I need to do this more and be patient, but this doesn't help: I wanted to have launched this community weeks ago; by going self-hosted I'm adding a few days to the launch. Which is fine, this is a skill I want to learn about self-hosting and even encourage more people to do it.

What I don't want to learn how email works and all the certification layers that need to happen for email to 'just work.' This seems to be a rabbit hole, and an exercise in Yak shaving. If I have to, I will, but I have dozens of things that are higher priority now. Email is smack in the middle of everything. Unless you solve it, you cannot do self-hosting. And it is unpleasant: anyone who doesn't want to have anything to do with sysadmin/servers (99% of the population) will not go through this hoop. I've been on desktop linux for > 20 years and I find it too convoluted. You need to understand way too many things to get it to work. It's like going to a shop to buy a piece of paper, which is just a prerequisite for what you wanted to do, and getting a lecture about growing trees and making paper. A lecture that if you don't attend, you will get no paper. Period.

I'll push it through and get it done. But my hopes of getting anyone around me to get this done themselves have dropped to zero.

This could be a problem: 'test mode, we are reviewing your account'

EDIT: this might explain everything:

Might be waiting 24 hrs 'solves email'. I would still love to know if I should remove the MX entries for titan mail and use one app from cloudron to read email from this domain. The mixed mx entries might be causing trouble.

I think I have set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC with postmark as they instructed. My reason to move to postmark was to avoid getting stuck in spam folder for the time it takes for the domain to warm up. Which coulld be days, and that would kill the project.