While looking for Discord alternatives I came across this project which looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations. Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren't the focus.

It's a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to find a self hosted PaaS to replace my usage of Vercel to host a couple of static websites. I use 11ty and Astro as Static Site Generators and I love the functionality of pushing to a git repo to update my site, and being able to create preview versions using pull requests.

If you haven’t used a PaaS before and are wondering what they’re used for, two of the biggest reasons people use them for are basically as Web GUIs to deploy OCI containers from a marketplace, think similar to the UnRAID App Store, and as hosting environments for code that’s built and deployed directly from the contents of a git repository like static sites or other apps. In my case, I use them to deploy static sites that I either build myself using SSGs, or for example the popular Digital Garden plugin for ObsidianMD.

The defacto leader in this space seems to be Coolify. And while it is fairly robust with a nice feature set, I couldn’t get past the dreadful UI. I’ve never encountered software that goes so far out of its way to hide information from you. It technically has a “dashboard”, but that only consists of a top level list of “Projects” with absolutely zero information about them or their current status Unless you drill down through the options all the way to individual services.

Nixopus appears to have a much more functional UI, but the focus of this one for the time being seems centered around spinning up docker containers of existing services. It has the functionality to deploy your own but that isn’t as fleshed out at this time.

ZaneOps is a little light on extra features, but has the most functional and informational UI of the three. I can see the status of all my deployed services at a glance, and its very lightweight.

Homebox is the inventory and organization system built for the Home User! With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, Homebox is the perfect solution for your home inventory, organization, and management needs. While developing this project I've tried to keep the following principles in mind:

Simple - Homebox is designed to be simple and easy to use. No complicated setup or configuration required. Use either a single docker container, or deploy yourself by compiling the binary for your platform of choice. Blazingly

Fast - Homebox is written in Go which makes it extremely fast and requires minimal resources to deploy. In general idle memory usage is less than 50MB for the whole container.

Portable - Homebox is designed to be portable and run on anywhere. We use SQLite and an embedded Web UI to make it easy to deploy, use, and backup.

(I am not affiliated with this project)

This update is effectively the public version of Developer Update 4, which contains actual details about the changes: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/26/everything-new-in-ios-17-beta-4/

“ What’s important to note is that this list is identical to those of the Facebook and Instagram apps. So if you use these other Meta products, you’ve already surrendered this information to the company.”