Decided to buy a raspberry pi, it arrived, I installed pihole on it and put it into my dad's house, all in a few days. Biggest win: I just took action and did it, instead of researching, brainstorming and writing down stuff for weeks and then never execute.

Depends on your needs. It's reasonable for mails you don't need instantly or offline, but at the same time should be encrypted at rest. I don't know if there is a new pricing model now, but I have paid 1€ a month, so basically nothing. If you don't mind the downsides and encryption is important to you, it's a very fair price I think.

Payed for 5 years, but now I'm in the progress of migrating to a "regular" mailservice. Problems I have with tuta: The client has become super slow in recent months, it seems to get worse and worse. Notifications don't arrive or arrive too late (Android). No other way than to use it with their clients. No offline support (or at least it doesn't work for me). UI/UX isn't that great either.

The home assistant integration does it for me.

Do you want your living room lights to turn red when the swarm grows? Of course you do.

I eagerly waiting every month for it.

Same here, I already know it's coming every friday afternoon, but I'm still happy when it pops up in my RSS reader. That's how I know the work day is over.

Oh and it's weekly btw :)

Good blog post, thanks for sharing.

I fully agree with your points about real openness, I think this "file over app philosophy" is the way to go for every self hosted app – make it possible get the data out of there.

What I did not quite understand is why using XML is slower? Why is that – are parsers just slower in general? I do not have a lot of experience with XML, but I always thought it pretty much doesn't matter whether you send your data via JSON or XML. And how does your JSON structure solve the problem of "content heavyness"?

Great job, thanks for sharing.

Thanks a lot for bringing yunohost up, this looks very very interesting. I will bring it up there.

When it comes to docker, I think at least Mac would be close to Linux (at least from my experience in my previous job – there are some integration issues, but managable I think). Windows I have no idea to be honest, could be a nightmare. For me the benefits of docker seem to be: isolation from the rest of the machine, and that pretty much every selfhostable app has a docker compose file.

I also love the "files over app" approach, I am doing it more and more for simple stuff like (habit-) tracking. With the tempo that applications become outdated or even obsolete, I think this is something very powerful.

I think your radicale/caldav approach is interesting. Would you then also run radicale on your phone? Or simply not have the calendar on your phone? Would syncthing only sync in your home network too?

Thanks, I'll check languagetool. stirling pdf already has a desktop client, although I don't know if it offers the same functionality (but I would expect it).

Nice, thanks for the syncthing use case.

Thanks, I thought about backups/snapshots too, especially snapshots before version updates, such that users can always jump back if something goes wrong.