I’ve been building a project to preserve family voices, stories, photos, and history, and one question has influenced almost every design decision:
Should something this personal ever require people to trust someone else’s servers?
That’s what pushed me toward making it open source and fully self-hostable. If someone wants to keep their family’s memories on hardware they own, they should be able to.
That said, I know not everyone wants to run a server, so I’m also offering a managed hosted version. The idea isn’t to lock anyone into a platform or build another big cloud service—it simply helps fund the project for people who’d rather not manage the infrastructure themselves.
For those of you who self-host, I’m curious:
Would you actually self-host something this personal?
What would make you trust (or distrust) a project like this?
What are some mistakes you’ve seen developers make when they say they support self-hosting?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing how this community thinks about it before I finish everything up.
Yeah that was part of what I wanted to do too. I was thinking through that and like there’s some stories that I wouldn’t want to post on Facebook. I know there’s ways to do it where you can limit who sees it, but it’s not really easy.
I figured this would be more just for family and maybe family friends and I wanted people to be able to have their own data that is for them rather than sometimes open for anyone to see.