Recording: Self-Hosting: Cooking your own Service

Download: Video (WEBM, libre, 113MB), Video (MP4, 362MB) (attribution)

Captions Coming Soon

About

We rely on a lot of online services, paid or not, provided by megacorps. Take back control by building the services you rely on yourself, known as self-hosting. We covered what is self-hosting, what it looks like, and what you can do in self-hosting.

Oliver Geer: This talk requires a certain level of technical knowledge. If you're not willing to learn it, I'd recommend a service self-hosted by a local community (paying the developers of the free and open source software too if possible), then a free and open source cloud hosted service (since it can be a good way to fund the development). I do not recommend the specific subset of cloud services that are proprietary and refuse to cooperate with standards and privacy, and if you can't self-host you don't have to resort to them.

Oliver Geer: Fact Check of 4:40: Google has tried mixing personalised advertising into its large language model features in opt-in and not clearly opt-in cases. This is assumedly via fine-tuning, prompt modification, and "agentic" features, which could be loosely called "training". This is a fast-moving space.

This talk was held live in Oxford on 30 January 2026, as part of this initiative. We have Oxford-based events about free, libre and open-source software, in-person and online for everyone!

Sections

Introduction: 00:00
What is Self Hosting?: 00:35
Why Host Services Yourself?: 02:43
What to Expect in Self Hosting? A Typical Setup: 08:01
Docker: 22:01
Introducing the Demo: code-server: 23:39
Live Demo: 26:20
Recommended Programs: 28:23
Q&A: What's your favourite Fediverse software?: 31:41
Q&A: Why do you prefer Matrix to XMPP?: 32:05
Q&A: What do you self-host? (Listed at skew.ch; CW: the domain name on the list is lewd): 33:15
Q&A: How do you deal with network effect-based services? (Do you bridge them via Matrix?): 34:21

Copy and Share

All original parts of this video are © 2026 Yong-Ho Shin, freely licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Click below for licenses of works used within it (which includes fair dealing of things with unspecified licenses).

Third-party free content

Background image by regisburin is dedicated to the public domain under CCO-1.0.
Title font © 2018 The Orbitron Project Authors is licensed OFL-1.1-RFN with RFN "Orbitron”.
Body font © 2007 Ek Type is licensed OFL-1.1-no-RFN.
Slide 3: Server © 2009 Florian Hirzinger is licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0. Slide 6: Stew © 2015 JIP is licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0; Frozen Pizza © 2023 Pannet is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0; Ramen by Reconrabbit is dedicated to the public domain under CCO-1.0.
Slide 14: Talon © 2011 Falcon Northwest is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0; Servers © 2004 David Monniaux is licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Slide 20, 29-32: Phone by filtre is dedicated to the public domain under CCO-1.0, Server by sagar_ns is dedicated to the public domain under CCO-1.0.
Slide 24, 28; (Interface of) Mozilla Firefox © 1994-2026 various is licensed under MPL-2.0.
Slide 36, 39-40, 42-43: (Interface of) Code Server

Coder Technologies Inc.

Third-Party fair dealing

Slide 7: In relation to the brands, Oliver Geer (not a lawyer) considers this fair dealing for parody. In relation to the meme creator, O.G. considers this fair dealing since memes are designed to be shared widely.
Slides 8-15, 23, 25, 27, 46: Screenshots of proprietary software and websites are mostly used for criticism and review, and are never acting as substitutes for the software, so Oliver Geer considers them fair dealing.
Slide 16: Since the post is attributed, available publicly on a Fediverse instance, and appears unharmful for moral rights, Oliver Geer considers this fair dealing.

Third-party trademarks: no endorsement

Slide 4, 8, 10, 12, 17-20, 45 (Trademarks, not copyright): Trademarks are used fairly as comparative advertising and critical review, or as nominative fair use. These projects do not necessarily endorse us.

License abbreviations are follawing the SPDX standard

Please don't hotlink the video file (you can link to this page) since my server couldn't handle it and this page may be replaced with a redirect to e.g. Hyper 8 / PeerTube without notice.