oranki

mDNS refers to multicast DNS (.local), while similar you should not mix it up with Tailscale’s MagicDNS, which is entirely a Tailscale thing, dependent on their APIs.

mDNS also seems to be what you’re after too. For the hostname-only resolution to work, you need to have Avahi or equivalent mDNS daemon running on the hosts, and add .local to the search domains. Setting search domains can be done manually on each host or via DHCP network-wide.

With mDNS and .local in the search domains, when you try e.g. http://myhost/ in the browser, the browser first tries myhost, then adds each search domain, e.g. myhost.local. Since .local is reserved for mDNS, querying it results in an mDNS query in your network, and if there’s a device with a matching name, it will respond with it’s IP address.

Note that if you have Tailscale and MagicDNS active, your tailnet’s domain will (or should) be the first one on the search domains list, and your DNS server is set to 100.100.100.100, which is a dummy address on which the tailscale daemon runs the internal DNS server for Tailscale, including MagicDNS.

Multicast DNS / Avahi is a little bit error prone in my experience, but when nothing goes wrong, this would give you what you’re looking for.

There are other options, like your router automatically registering DNS entries for DHCP hosts, or running a separate DNS server anf manually adding records for the hosts you need this for.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing!

No, I haven’t tried OC. Lot of people still prefer it over NC. I think both have come quite a long way since then.

I wouldn’t say Nextcloud is hard to maintain, even less so if you keep the number of apps to a minimum. The initial setup may require some work, but small instances are mostly plug and play.

Note that I’ve never used AIO. If going for containers, the community images are better, despite AIO advertised as the official method. I recommend using Podman, check out

https://github.com/0ranki/nextcloud-previews

Also a blog post: https://oranki.net/posts/2025-01-02-self-hosting-my-way5-nextcloud/

Nextcloud, despite you’re not considering it. You can disable or not install the apps you don’t need, like Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Dashboard, Activity, etc.

There’s also a fork of Filebrowser, called Filebrowser Quantum, which I’ve been interested in, though haven’t tried yet: https://github.com/gtsteffaniak/filebrowser

I set the color theme to as black and white as possible, then use the themed icons because it makes the phone less attractive to look at. Contemplating on setting grayscale mode on full time.

So yes, I don’t like it either.

I haven’t tried an OG Mastodon server, but currently running a GotoSocial instance, just for me.

With mostly the default retention etc. settings, the instance takes at most a couple gigs of storage space. If some image has been rotated, it will be refetched if you view the post again.

As for Federation, a single user instance is probably not a good idea if you’re just starting with the Fediverse. Only content from accounts a user on your server follows will reach your server, including posts boosted by the people someone follows. I was already following about 150 accounts when I set it up, so I didn’t really notice much difference in the home feed.

OG Mastodon can utilize relays, which will help with the lack of content.

For following topics, I made another user that follows some hashtag bots from fedi.buzz. The bots boost all posts with specific hashtags, so the posts reach my server.

If I were to do this again, I’d probably go with full Mastodon instead of GtS, just because I like the UI. There are other niceties too.

I think there’s no way to keep the same domain while changing the underlying server software, without breaking federation. If someone knows a way I’d be really interested.