SelfPrivacy is in “Open beta” and promises to make setup and use of email, messager, password management, video chat and other services simple by leveraging the likes of Hetzner, Cloudflare, and Backblaze.

I stumbled on the app while browsing the F-droid app “store” and had never heard of them. I think the proposition is neat and while I’m comfortable hosting most of these services myself, my curiosity has been piqued. Searching for it elsewhere on the web as far as privacy rating, reviews, etc has left me empty handed. I dont’ know if they’re just too new or not. So I’m curious if anyone has tried them out or looked into it further.

  • circuscritic
    3·
    1 year ago

    Not really, sort of, but different threat models IMO.

    The app this thread was about is asking to become a single pane for external services e.g. cloud, which is why it requires your Hertzner API.

    For the following, I’m reaching into my memory hole, so definitely check elsewhere to confirm before doing anything.

    FreedomBox, if I recall, is basically Debian Linux with a variety of self-hosted tools that are easily configurable e.g. Media servers, torrents, NextCloud, etc. It’s been around for a while and I don’t recall ever hearing anything bad about the project.

    Ultimately, sure, you’re still trusting the maintainers to some degree, like with any distro/spin, but that’s a judgement you’ll have to make for yourself.

    If you’re going to use Freedom box for all of your most critical and private parts of your digital life, then you should probably weigh the risks more heavily, than if you’re just going to make it a media and torrent box.