Real-time web search via Brave - no tracking, no bubbles, just truth

I wonder if they realize that the owner of Brave is everything they supposedly stand against.

Military grade encryption (aes-256)

I smell bullshit.

…and absolutely no mention of how it was trained. Does it still crawl the entire internet to steal and plunder and train on material obtained without consent?

Whats are pros of XMPP?

Pros of XMPP is that I can fully self host it, it can do video & audio calls too, and has good clients that aren’t just a webpage wrapped in Blink (aka, Electron). Matrix is a pain in the ass to self host, especially if I don’t want to federate. My XMPP server is private, friends & family can use it, and that’s it. That’s what I needed, and it delivered perfectly. It does End-to-End encryption. It is weaker than Signal, for sure, but it’s enough for what I need it for. In short: it’s reasonably simple to self host, has good, usable clients for both platforms I care about (Linux & Android), we can chat, we can have group chats, we can have audio & video calls.

Also could u tell me about self hosting cost and time you spend on it?

Well, I’ve been self-hosting since about 1998, so the time I spend on it nowadays is very little. One of my servers has been running for ~4 years without any significant change. I upgrade it once in a while, tweak my spam filters once a week or so, and go my merry way. I haven’t rebooted it in… checks uptime 983 days. Maybe I should. My other, newer server, is only about a year old - it took a LOT of time to set that up, and the first few months required a lot of time. But that was because I switched from Debian to NixOS, and had to figure out a lot of stuff. Nowadays, I run just sys update && just sys deploy (at home, on my desktop pc), and both my tiny VPS and my homelab is upgraded. I do tweak it from time to time - because I want to, and I enjoy doing so. I don’t have to. Strictly necessary maintenance time is about an hour a week if I try to be a good sysadmin, ~10-15 minutes otherwise. It Just Works™.

As for costs: my setup is… complicated. I have a 2014-era Mac Mini in my home office, which hosts half my self-hosted things (Miniflux, Atuin server, EteBase, Grafana, Prometheus, ntfy, readeck, vaultwarden, victorialogs, and postgres to serve as a database for many of these). It’s power consumption is inconsequential, and the network traffic is negligible too - in a large part because I’m the primary user of it anyway. It is not connected to the public internet directly, however: I have an €5/month tiny VPS I rented from Hetzner, that fronts for it. The VPS runs WireGuard, and fronts the services on the Mac Mini through Caddy. iocaine takes care of the scrapers and other web-based annoyances (so hardly anything reaches my backend), unbound provides a resolver for my infra, vector ferries select logs from the VPS to VictoriaLogs in my homelab, and I’m running HAProxy to front for stuff Caddy isn’t good for (ie, anything other than http).

Oh, yeah, I forgot… we have poweroutages here every once in a while, so I have to turn the mac mini back on once a month or so. It happens so rarely that I didn’t set up proper Clang + Tavis-based LUKS unlocking, so I have to plug a monitor and a keyboard in. It didn’t reach a level of annoying to make me address it properly.

A bunch of my other services (GoToSocial, Forgejo + Forgejo runner, Minio [to be replaced with SeaweedFS or Garage], and my email) are still on an old server, because the mac mini doesn’t have enough juice to run them along with everything else it is already running. I plan to buy a refurbished ThinkCentre or similar, and host these in my homelab too. That’s going to be a notable up front cost, but as I plan to run the same thing for a decade, it will be a lot cheaper than paying for a similarly sized VPS for 10 years. The expensive part of this is storage (I have a lot of Stuff™), but only comparatively.

By far the most expensive part of my self-hosting are backups. I like to have at least two backups (so three copies total, including the original) of important things, and that’s not cheap - I have a lot of data to backup (granted, that includes my music, photo & media library, both of which are large).

• Music -> Navidrome / mpd + various clients
• Google maps -> When we’re driving, I have an offline GPS. Otherwise CoMaps.
• Comms -> XMPP (Prosody on the server, Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android) & Signal (latter mostly at work)
• Email -> self hosted (usual postfix + dovecot + rspamd + etc stack) with notmuch as my main client K9 on the phone
• Authenticator -> Aegis
• Password manager -> self-hosted VaultWarden
• Google Reader (RIP) -> miniflux
• Bookmarks -> Readeck

I’ve been happily using impermanence for well over a year now, with BTRFS under my persistent volume on most hosts (and tmpfs for /, because that was easier, and I don’t need the safety of having snapshots of my impermanent stuff), and it gets me that great freshly installed system feeling on every boot, and incredibly convenient backups.

Can recommend.

I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration.

…fuck. I failed the saving throw. I’m sorry.

Do look into Ansible, and the whole configuration management topic, though.

Here you go. Daily stats from my defense system. All those disguised bots? ~60% of them are from Alibaba’s ASN.

It is easy to verify, too: throw up any https site, and all the crawlers will be on your neck within days.

There is a reason why Anubis’s botPolicies.yaml includes Alibaba. There’s a reason why a whole lot of sites - Codeberg included - blocks their entire ASN on the firewall.

You’re welcome.

I wonder why scrapers hit my sites with millions of requests every day. Alibaba in particular is quite aggressive there.

…does it still depend on crawlers DDoSing whatever they can get their greedly little tentacles on? While also trying to pretend they’re not AI scrapers?

Yeah, setting the server up was a bit of an adventure. But I did that once, and it’s been serving us well since. My users saw none of that.

I have an unfederated XMPP server (running Prosody), family’s using Conversations (Android) & Dino (Linux) with it. We can chat, send images, do voice & video calls. Has been working fine & reliably for the past ~6 years or so. Took about 1.5 minutes for them to get used to the clients.

I’m slowly opening it up for friends too, so friends, neighbours, classmates, etc can chat with us too. It’s going great so far, no complaints.

We pay more for ingress of logs than service uptime

I cried on this part, it hit home so hard. My homelab went down a couple of months ago, when Chinese LLM scrapers hit me with a wave of a few thousand requests per second. It didn’t go down because my services couldn’t serve a few k requests/second - they could, without batting an eye. However, every request also produced a log, which was sent over to my VictoriaLogs, behind a WireGuard tunnel, running on an overloaded 2014-era Mac Mini. VictoriaLogs could kind of maybe handle it, but the amount of traffic on the WireGuard tunnel saturated my connection at home, which meant that the fronting VPS started to buffer them, and that cascaded into disaster.

I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

I’m not a big distrohopper…

I self host my email, and I have one mailbox, but countless addresses. Everything that needs an email address, has its dedicated one. Not because of security considerations (if someone would get into any of my aliases, I’d be fucked either way), but because I find it easier to filter and manage.

Like,if I get an email to randomwebshop@, and it hasno relation to said place, I will know that they either sold my data, or were compromised. I can then route it to /dev/null, and then everyone who tries to spam that address will be gone from my inbox.

It also makes it easier to tag mail, because I tag based on a property that I control. No reliance on sender, subject, list id or anything that the sender controls.