I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I’ll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.

Thank you for the advice. Honestly, I’m a young 20 something that just wants to output creative stuff for people to read and enjoy. None of this really popped in my head, so thanks.

I still want to host my own site for it though, but I will consider the self publishing angle as well. Thanks for the advice.

Awesome! Now I go back to waiting for the 24TB Ironwolf drives to drop.

Whoa, that’s sexy. What dashboard is that?

Awesome! Just to explain a bit, Matrix is a FOSS and decentralized chat protocol that’s more feature rich than XMPP, but also younger and less mature. It’s more popular than XMPP at the moment, and has a lot of nice and modern clients to pick from. I hope it can serve your team well if you guys decide to pick it up.

Fuck, really? Now I feel like an idiot. Thanks for making me aware. Still praying for a Linux client, NixOS doesn’t play too well with things outside the Nix ecosystem. Maybe I can contribute to the Linux efforts when I gain the proper skills.

Fair enough, hopefully it doesn’t lead to any fuss with the big corpos if this project grows to a decent size. Gaming is pretty untouched in the self-hosted world, who knows what’ll happen. It’s pretty exciting tbh.

Off topic, is there any chance you guys can create a Matrix space and bridge it with the Discord? I’d love to chat, but I really am trying to move away from Discord.

The rebrand is great! I’m loving the icon, and am looking forward to seeing how this project progresses. I just have a few questions.

1. Even beyond a Linux client, how about a Linux server package? I understand the client situation. Microsoft dominates in the desktop space, but it’s the complete opposite in the server space. Windows server is a super niche option. This severely limits the amount of people who can host this service imo.

2. I get there’s a piracy disclaimer, but I do think it would just be better to change the “alternatively sourced” phrase all together. I feel that phrasing makes Gamevault a lot easier to attack for those who may not be fond of such a service existing. Maybe just say DRM-Free? It seems like the easiest way to dodge that sort of thing. Perhaps there’s a better way to phrase it that I’m not thinking of.

Overall, an awesome project! I know a lot of friends who can’t afford to buy a lot of games, and I’ve always wanted to share my library with them. It also made me think a lot more about how centralized PC gaming is nowadays. Nearly every seller distributes through Steam or Epic, and has some form of DRM. If Steam/Epic wanted to, your entire library or any game they chose could be deleted from the marketplace. Even if you have it downloaded locally, sadly a ton of games rely on the connection to Steam servers to function. Even if the games themselves are completely offline, or single player. Gog, Itch, and any other similar platforms are a rarity nowadays, and lot of the bigger publishers and developers don’t use them.

Apologies for the text wall, it was not originally supposed to be this long. I hope you got something out of my rambling. I look forward to when I can run this when Linux is (hopefully) better supported and the project matures to a point where I can transfer over. Maybe I’ll repurchase some games on Gog in that time. I do wonder how this’ll affect my experience with the Steam Deck…

I’d actually prefer full CLI/TUI for management, but it’s interesting to see how many different alternatives there are. I only knew about Tailscale going into this.

This seems like a good middleground, I might use it if my stubborn attempt to use Netbird doesn’t work. Thanks!

This seems cool, but damn I wish there was something like this for Steam games or something. That’s the biggest thing I miss from Sony’s ecosystem, and Steam’s “Family Share” is pretty bad in comparison.

Thank you! The only thing I’d want to host is Owncast upon reflection, which I probably won’t be doing until I have a better setup than I do now.