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.
No. The only one in my family with skills or motivation to maintain it is me.
If I was going to do something managed, I would use a big cloud service, because even with Google enshittifying and killing projects all the time, it’s still more reliable than some random guy.
But there’s not much point in that when a couple archival-quality scrapbooks, journals, photo albums, and video/audio interviews can do the same thing with no rug to pull.