✕ what this is

heyhowdy.org is a homelab. One person. I run services I use myself and share with people I actually know — or know-adjacent people I've decided are worth the risk

hosting & infrastructure

Hosted on Hetzner in the EU (Finland and Germany). Privacy-respecting, reasonably priced, and not a surveillance company cosplaying as a cloud provider. Full privacy policy at hetzner.com/legal/privacy-policy.

Self-hosting means your data sits on hardware I control and doesn't get vacuumed up and sold. The tradeoff: I'm also the IT department. One person, finite time, finite patience.

uptime & reliability

None guaranteed. This is a homelab, not a datacenter. Things break. Updates happen at weird hours. Services go dark without warning and come back whenever I get to them. If you need SLAs, you're genuinely in the wrong place.

That said — I use these services every day, so when something breaks I'm usually annoyed about it too and tend to fix it fast.

who can access services

Most things are invite-only or require me to provision an account. Not gatekeeping for sport — just finite resources and a strong preference for knowing who I'm hosting. If you're a friend or in a shared community and want access to something specific, ask. Matrix or email both work.

the matrix server

The heyhowdy.org Matrix homeserver is small and invite-only. Applying means an actual human (me, probably) reads it and makes a call. Keep it brief: who you are, how you found this. That's genuinely all I need.

server rules (short version)

• Be a decent human.
• No harassment, hate speech, or targeted nastiness of any kind.
• No illegal content.
• No crypto spam, NFT pitches, or grifty self-promotion.
• This server federates — behave like the wider Matrix network can see you. Because it can.
• Dormant accounts may get cleaned up. I'll try to warn you first.

data & privacy

I collect what's needed to run services: usernames, hashed passwords, email if you provide one. Nothing gets sold, shared, or fed to anything. Logs exist for debugging and don't stick around longer than necessary.

Want your account deleted? Hit me up on Matrix or by email. Done.

the indie web & self-hosting

If any of this makes you want to run your own stuff — good. IndieWeb.org for the philosophy, selfh.st for a directory of self-hostable apps, noted.lol for write-ups from people in the trenches. The internet is more interesting when people stop renting space on someone else's platform and build their own thing. Go do that.