rauthy looks interesting. I might even write a nixos module so I can try it out.

As an aside, despite the learning curve, i think nix is a really good fit for community hosting. Everything is way less brittle and you can almost always roll back to a working config if something goes wrong in an update.

I know it doesn't use standard sysadmin tools, but building atomic deployments with standard tools is way more complicated, I think, than learning nix.

I'm not a system administrator and as I've tried to host stuff on my laptops, and such nix has been the thing that has taken the stress out of maintaining my own stuff.

did you manage to find any local groups doing self-hosting?

we are like a pretty diverse crowd running @coopcloud and people who never touched a terminal are getting stuff deployed: https://coopcloud.tech/blog/march-2026-equinox/

we (@varia) wrote some guides which might help: https://homebrewserver.club

there's a lot of stuff online but i know it's way nicer to meet people locally and do stuff together...

i can only wish you good luck with the search!

> the core of the problem for community hosters is that you need people with specialist skills to do this work and you don’t have a lot of those.

Yep. I have minimal sysadmin skills. I would love to run some services off a PC under a desk for a community space I'm part of, but I just dont have the skills. Do you know of any groups that support would-be community-infra creator-maintainers?

that's great to hear also. good luck with it and please do consider sharing your experiences. I'd be curious how you get on ️

I can share configs or tips if you run into issues when setting things up and/or maintaining it