A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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A good place to start is to choose one objective, then set out to learn how to accomplish it. Apart from enrolling in some university courses, that is.
I set out with zero knowledge about a year ago and wanted to locally control my smart switches. I'm now running a media stack and degoogled phone apps.Still have a lot to learn but this community has been a huge help
I wouldn't think so. At the barest level, it's just running a service locally instead of out in the world for public consumption. Easiest place to start is finding some service you want to host locally, read the quick start docs, try and get it running, and then branch out from there once you're familiar with the basics.
For the most part, "self-hosting" just means running something locally or on your local network, though some people do take further steps to harden a bit and expose it to the world. For the latter parts, read up on what you can find about the basics of security/netsec.
I'd start with some basic IT classes (there should be plenty for free online) and then do basic Ethernet networking and basic Linux administration. Those will give you a foundation to build on, you can follow up with a basic docker course and then read any guides or documentation for the specific services you want to run.
It's a very deep field. You're not going to find a single guide to cover everything. You're basically ask for a quick start guide to something people spend their entire careers on - anything that meets that isn't going to go into any depth.
I'd start with something like network+ material if you want to learn networking basics.
It's too broad of a field to cover in one book. Id recommend getting an idea of what you want to achieve and work towards that. You will learn along the way.
Ex: I want my own google photos alternative.
This will lead you to figure out which service to host, the operating system you should use and what kind of hardware you want to run it while factoring your power draw requirements, network needs, security, and ease of access. Use more than one guide and ask yourself why one guide does something differently than the other.
The next time you want to host something similar, you will already have answers to these questions.
As step one, I'd get familiar with linux CLI. Get a hello world website running and access it from a device on your network. Preferably without docker because copy pasting a docker run command will teach you nothing.
For the moment, I think the best advice is to learn Linux. If you want an "all in one place" approach to that, it would mean one of the Linux administration courses on Udemy, but there's also heaps of good beginner content on YouTube. I imagine by the time you got half way through the course and could spin up a VPS, point a domain name at it, and run things in Docker you'd be ready to shift your learning to the practical things you wanted to host then learn that way - by trying.
This has come up a few times on Lemmy and elsewhere, and I'd love us (the community) to come up with a better answer - some sort of "Self-Hosting for Dummies" starter document, but spanning the giant divide between the general overview and practical achievements, and then keeping it up to date would be a Herculean task.