How do you sort through the trash though?

The thing about SO is there really is a ton of poorly phrased or poorly researched questions asked each hour. So, how do you find quality questions to dedicate your time answering? How do you search QA when there’s a number of similar questions asked?

That’s the thing StackOverflow was trying to solve.

There’s millions of people with programming questions that think their problem is unique or they simply don’t understand how to research their issue, so you end up with a ton of bad or duplicated questions.

First off, there’s nothing we can do about moving away from larger hosting Corporations, not with the technology we currently have. If we want to reach a national or international audience, we need infrastructure, and that has to come from somewhere; a business model makes sense. If you’re hosting to a small community, you’d be able to get away with 1 selfhost, but to scale you’d need redundancies and bandwidth. The best choice we can make is the companies we would rather do business with. At this point, I’m definitely favoring Cloudflare and Azure (in that order) over AWS.

I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

I see this in a lot of comments about this so while I don’t want to downplay the severity of this, I’ve personally never see instance in-fighting. Maybe it’s the things I’m subscribed to, idk, but I usually visit both my local and all just to see what’s going on. The Hexbear domain being sold is probably one of the first times I’ve run across discussions about other instances. Also, their domain being sold is lowkey hilarious. That was a problem as old as the internet (losing a domain). As we move to decentralization and privatization/ownership of data that’s going to continue to be a thing I think.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit,

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the intra-channel fighting - is it just disagreeable people commenting, or is it like “This community is better than that” or “This instance is better than that”? I often see discussions on Reddit, arguing, bad faith actors, but I wouldn’t classify that as in-channel-fighting. idk.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually.

Complain. JoinLemmy is Open Source on Github. If you have ideas - share them. If you take a look through their issues and feel like adding in your 2 cents, go for it.

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It’s goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

Eh, Jellyfin is just a storage. I mostly use it to link up to Symphonium.

Need For Speed isn’t on GoG yet.

oh no…

A lot of news outlets have turned into just churning drama. I’ve noticed it this election cycle with NYT and CNN.

I don’t know if this will help anyone but damn is the documentation on how to do this kind of thing scarce so here I am. I was quite a struggle both learning all this and implementing it but it’s been fun overall.

FreeDNS doesn’t seem to have a way to add any kind of SSL Certs as far as I can tell. Not that I needed to, but when I tried explaining my situation to the hosting provider they suggested that the cert needed to be on the DDNS server.

I also couldn’t get the Asustor Reverse Proxy to work either. Many of the tutorials and user suggestions i ran across suggested that this is the way to get SSL but when I tried to implement it I kept landing at my portal login and nothing was getting proxy’d. The netstat command was showing that whatever the reverse proxy port needed was not open - I also ran across this in a 2020+ thread on Asustor.

Right now I’ll also need to manually update the certs and go through this process again in 3 months time. There might be a way to automate this process but it’s a lot of steps that I’m not sure can be automated in this seeming (to me) flawed setup. In any case, it’s been challenging but fun and I think in the next 6 months I’ll upgrade out of Asustor and into a bigger server with a core Linux setup. I know nothing about Linux :)

I do appreciate everyone’s suggestions and help. Here’s what I ended up doing.

FreeDNS via freedns.afraid.org as a DDNS Subdomain

Domain + Subdomain via hosting provider

Hosted Subdomain CNAME to the DDNS Subdomain

Setup DDNS using Asustor > Settings > Manual Connect and setting up a FreeDNS account and input the info it needed. Last DDNS update keeps coming back as Failure but FreeDNS keeps updating my IP so it seems to work, but for whatever reason Asustor doesn’t think it’s working.

Used openssl + certbot CLI tools to generate a certificate that covers all 3 cases: Hosted Subdomain, Hosted Domain, DDNS Subdomain. Looks like this:

certbot certonly --key-type rsa --rsa-key-size 2048 --manual --preferred-challenges dns -d hosteddomain.example -d subdomain.hosteddomain.example -d ddns.domain.example

This will set up verification codes that you can create TXT records for on the Hosted Domain and the DDNS Domain. I had to contact FreeDNS to get access to add text records with underscores but they were cool and quick to reply. They look like this:

_acme-challenge.hosteddomain.example
8suZTccF9ZpB0fnBr9mgEEXTcX7cqSkDXiBzucTcOfw

Once the certificates are in place I uploaded them to my Hosted Domain and verified that my Hosted Domain was showing the SSL certificate / lock at HTTPS.

Next I logged into my Asustor and under Settings > Certificate Manager I added my SSL Certificates and assigned it as the primary certificate for the NAS.

Finally, I needed to enable SSL on my Jellyfin, which required a PFX file.

openssl pkcs12 --export -out "Z:\Path\To\PFXOutput\jellyfin.pfx" -inkey "Z:\Path\To\Cert\jellyfin.key" -in "Z:\Path\To\Cert\jellyfin.crt"

Under Jellyfin > Dashboard > Networking I enable HTTPS, Require HTTPS, give it the path to the PFX file and the PFX password, and Allow remote connections to the server. I disabled port forwarding from Jellyfin and had to jump into my router to remove the UPnP records it had previously added. All port numbers are default to Jellyfin and no URLs in the Server Address Settings.

Important to take note of the Jellyfin ports here for both HTTP and HTTPS requests. Important note to restart Jellyfin after this takes effect. Asustor has an App Central where under Installed Apps you can just turn it off and back on again.

Finally, I added Port Forwarding to my router so that the 443 looks for the Jellyfin HTTPS port and 80 looks for the Jellyfin HTTP port at my NAS IP.

Now I can access HTTPS subdomain.domain.example and land at my Dockered Jellyfin app.

No, I don’t necessarily want other people to access my Jellyfin, but my folx live out in the boons, (visiting on holidays etc.) and that was the only way I could find to reliably access my media. I guess I also come from a web background so it felt right to me. The Asustor I have really limits what I can and can’t do with it. I got it as a like, starter point since it felt out of the box. I’m also on Windows lol.

Do you have any resources for how I could grant access outside my network with a VPN, wireguard, or tailscale? I’m open to other options, I’m really just kind of fumbling my way through this idea of what I want.

I do have port 80 open as well as 443, both going to my Jellyfin HTTP/HTTPS ports respectively. HTTP seems to work for both when I access “pretty” domain and the FreeDNS URLs directly. It’s really only when I try to force HTTPS that I’m having issues.

I’ll play around with Let’s Encrypt today to see if I can get the FreeDNS cert applied. I’ve tried to use AI to assist me in learning how to do all this, it suggests I need both my “pretty” domain and the FreDNS domain tied to the same Cert, which Im unable to do at my current domain registrar, so I might also need to move that but I’ll take it one step at a time.

Oh no.

I decided to go with an Asustor prebuilt NAS for my first self-host. It’s got a Jellyfin app, but not an Audiobookshelf app.

Jellyfin runs on Docker, so I have the Docker app installed and running.

Audiobookshelf runs on Docker. Could I just like, spin up a container and run it? How would I access it through my Asustor? I access Jellyfin either direct or through my portal dashboard.

So many questions! Like, I lowkey love having all my media accessible in 1 place: Series, Movies, Music, Audiobooks all in one place through Jellyfin. If I split my Audiobooks into Audiobookshelf somehow, how do I keep the ease of access? Maybe spin up another Docker container and create a landing page linking both Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf? Could (should I? Can I?) do it all through the same Docker container that Jellyfin is currently run on? Are there tutorials about this?

Thank you again for the suggestion

Do you have any recommended resources for getting started? I do have a secondary PC…