This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.

The technology is using my open source project https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks

Also I am currently only targeting locals so I can physically go to their place and configure their server.

I don’t mind growing slowly here btw. It’s my side business and I plan to keep my current job for the time being.

https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks

The idea is a contract is defined saying which options exist and what they mean. For backups, you’d get the Unix user doing the backup, what folders to backup and what patterns to exclude. But also what script can be run to create a backup and restore from a backup.

Then you’d get a contract consumer, the application to be backup, which declares what folders to backup either which users.

On the other side you have a contract provider, like Restic or Borgbackup which understand this contract and know thanks to it how to backup the application.

As the user, your role is just to plug-in a contract provider with a consumer. To choose which application backs up which application.

This can be applied to LDAP, SSO, secrets and more!

Yes, the only solution is self-hosting and yes it requires being your own sysadmin and it’s hard and not convenient. That’s why I’m building https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks. It’s a NixOS collection of modules that sets up services that fit well together and have declarative setup for LDAP and SSO. They have integrated backups, https and other features required for self-hosting. Also, the LDAP and SSO setup is tested with e2e NixOS VM tests that use playwright to make sure users can login if they have access.

I’m hoping to lower the bar to self-hosting significantly.

+1

> No Per-Seat Pricing — One install, unlimited users. Pay nothing or pay for support—your choice.

+1

> Open Source — AGPL-3.0 licensed. Inspect the code, modify it, contribute back. Transparency builds trust.

Fully agreed.

From reading the readme and the docs, I am left with wondering how the software would benefit me. I would like to see more screenshots and use cases.

I wanted to highlight one unexpected but very welcomed side effect of having those stateful property tests is we could use them to design high fidelity stubs. I wrote a follow-up blog post about it https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2024-07-08-make-good-stubs-w...

I’ve been working for the past 3 years on SelfHostBlocks https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks, making self-hosting a viable and convenient alternative to the cloud for non technical people.

It is based on NixOS and provides a hand-picked groupware stack: user-facing there is Vaultwarden and Nextcloud (and a bunch more but those 2 are the most important IMO for non technical people as it covers most of one’s important data) and on the backend Authelia, LLDAP, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Grafana and some more. My know-how is in how to configure all this so they play nice together and to have backups, SSO, LDAP, reverse proxy, etc. integration. I’m using it daily as the house server, I’m my first customer after all. And beginning of 2025 it passed my own internal checkpoint to be shared with others and there’s a handful of technical users using it.

My goal is to work on this full time. I started a company to provide a white glove installation, configuration and maintenance of a server with SelfHostBlocks. Everything I’ll be doing will always be open source, same as the whole stack and the server is DIY and repair friendly. The continuous maintenance is provided with a subscription which includes customer support and training on the software stack as needed.