This is the selfhosted community; Who are you training? In most cases there’s literally only one person who would ever need SSH access to this server. Maybe two or three in a tiny handful of cases, but anyone who can’t figure out Netbird in 30 seconds absolutely should not be accessing anything via SSH.

And you’ve clearly never used Netbird, Tailscale, or any similar service, if you think that update, maintenance and config constitute any kind of meaningful burden, especially for something as simple as remote access to a VPS.

We’re in selfhosted. If you have to bring up use cases that are in no way relevant to 99% of self hosters to justify your argument, you don’t have an argument.

A lot of things are “fine”, but the cost of adding Netbird to your VPS is effectively zero, whether counted in dollars, time, or convenience.

Given the massive security benefits of using a VPN, and the lack of any meaningful downside to doing so, you’d be an idiot not to.

And mine. Clearly one of us is better at it.

You seem like a fan of the “pull out” method.

This is the correct answer. Never expose your SSH port on the public web, always use a VPN. Tailscale, Netmaker or Netbird make it piss easy to connect to your VPS securely, and because they all use NAT traversal you don’t have to open any ports in your firewall.

Combine this with configuring UFW on the server (in addition to the firewall from the VPS provider - layered defence is king) and Fail2Ban. SSH keys are also a good idea. And of course disable root SSH just in case.

With a multi-layered defence like this you will be functionally impervious to brute force attacks. And while each layer of protection may have an undiscovered exploit, it will be unlikely that there are exploits to bypass every layer simultaneously (Note for the pendants; I said “unlikely”, not “impossible”. No defence is perfect).

Yeah, the potential for real hazard to life and limb is very high here. This isn’t like fucking around with your IOT lightbulbs. This could kill somebody.

For the record, I use a mouse with my non-dominant hand and I can play even fast paced FPS games like Titanfall competently enough. I actually used to dominate on Splitgate for a while. It’s a skill that can be learned. I have the advantage of having done it my whole life and I fully acknowledge that’s hard to replicate, but I think that with some practice anyone should be able to get to the point where they can play slower, primarily mouse driven games like turn based RPGs. Real time with pause might also be doable if you bind the pause button to the mouse (a mouse with some extra bindable keys would really help here). Anyway, just a thought.

If those options don’t work, maybe look into games like Vampire Survivor, or Realm of The Mad God (though I think the latter does need some rapid mouse inputs when looting, so maybe not so good).

Calibre can also be a server. And you can still put DRM free books on your Kobo device.

I’ve also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.

There’s a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They’ve raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I’ve been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I’m going to go, specifically because it’s basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I’m pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they’re used to will be the easiest transition.

It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.

I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn’t feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I’d go.