Yunohost, seriously?

Besides being a pretty funny pun, that makes for a nice organization or product name, imo.

Yunohost is a tool that rocket launches beginners into self hosting. Self hosting your services has never been easier! Other tools that come to mind with ease of use and deployment streamlining are SelfPrivacy and Nextcloud All-in-One which both simplify a huge chunk of service management for the user, albeit for different stages and levels of granularity.

Yunohost is on another level though. The group of french core volunteers maintaining the project as well as the satellite contributors worldwide are making the product quite worthwhile. From handling mail server set-up, to SSO, to domain registration, to database setup, to very sane defaults, to an impeccably well designed diagnostics tool, it is one of the best examples of how well open source can inter-operate when the configuration defaults and the go-to resources are standardized.

Additionally, simplifying self-hosting the way Yunohost does is an indirect security advantage - no one user can keep track of all the corners a linux system can have gaping holes in, let alone the services he deploys himself defining their own reverse proxy settings or endpoints. Being an expert of Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Immich, Keycloak, Wordpress, Debian and MariaDB all at once is not a walk in the park. Yunohost allows these services' defaults and configurations to have some "package manager"-like source of truth, for which if one single user finds a glaring security issue and reports it, the patch benefits everyone. Herd security the open source way.

If you do not actively monitor your Yunohost instance, you may benefit from installing the unattended_upgrades service, which automates installing security upgrades and conveniently emails you when it does. My hope is that the tug and pull of Yunohost security defaults and users contributing to their open source projects can push for saner and more sanitized open source projects that benefit everyone. This comes without saying, those of you with a stricter threat model won't be satisfied with its average security level, but I urge you nonetheless to contribute to the projects you would love to reach a good-enough level of security for you to benefit from by default.

That's all from me. Happy hostober!