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.
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.