Sorry if I’m mistaken on this, but I’m still new to self-hosting.
Currently I use SyncThing and I love it. My files are accessible to me wherever I am in the world, and it costs me nothing.
I’d like to move more of my life to self-hosted servers. I’m looking at leaving Spotify for Funkwhale. But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.
Why is that? Is there a way to make my costs 0, the way they are with SyncThing?
Syncthing uses a centralized discovery server to connect device IDs to IP addresses (although you can change this to point to your own discovery server, too).
I don’t know if Funkwhale has a similar option.
The two pieces of software have very different topologies.
In very broad strokes: Something like FunkWhale uses a server-client model. To get to it, you connect to it remotely and you need some way to get there. By contrast Syncthing behaves as a mesh of nodes. Each node connects directly to the other nodes and the syncthing project folks host relays that help introduce the nodes to one another and penetrate NAT.
No, you may not need a paid domain to use your self-hosted FunkWhale server (I haven’t dabbled with that service in particular). There are a few options.
- You could probably use the direct public IP address or alternatively
- Use a dynamic DNS provider (like afraid.org) to resolve your IP address
- Use a VPN on all of your clients and use local DNS to resolve your FunkWhale server’s local IP address.
These all assume that you have a public IP address on your router and not one that’s being NAT-ed by your ISP.
Again, these are very broad strokes, but hopefully it helps point your in a direction for some research.
+1 for afraid.org.
12 years and counting, propagation is sufficiently fast.
But: Depending on your ISP, you may be able to get a free public (but not stable, and no rDNS) IPv4, or you already have an IPv6 range that can directly route to your router freely. And if you need a Domain, you can either rent one for ~5€/Year, or use a free Domain service (eg. ddns.net)
You can use a service like duckdns.org for free to get a (sub)domain that can be used with funkwhale.
If you use tailscale you could pretty easily get similar results.
Tailscale to broker connections between devices and then access with the tailscale IP address
The cool thing about SyncThing is that it’s peer to peer, meaning you don’t need a central server for your files to sync. They can go between your laptop and phone, for example.
Something like Funkwhale does need a server, and to talk to that server outside your local network, you need a domain name.
As some others have said, you could use a VPN like Tailscale to connect to your local network remotely. Alternatively, you could simply not deal with all the faff and only use your services locally, which is what I do with Nextcloud and Immich. Syncs when I get home but doesn’t when I’m not, and I can always use Tailscale to remotely access my server if there are any issues.
These responses are SO helpful and I’m genuinely learning so much here. Thank you everyone!
