The tech giant says the system only analyzes hand-movement points from a short video, does not record audio, and deletes the footage after verification.

It’s just a short video guys, there’s even no audio! And they pinky promise to delete it.

What a fucking shitshow that is. Like, honestly, I’m fine with regular captchas, even if they are the shitty ones. The newer (?) captchas that force you to do solve 5 bullshit “place this there” captchas are already reason enough for me to just leave the site. But if you force me to record a video of me throwing gang signs at the camera, probably several times again, because the movement was not correctly identified, I’m sure as fuck to never visit anything related to you ever again.

I also love the irony that Google fights people bots, while they are scraping the whole internet and investing into AI automation massively.

I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.

This is literally what you’ve called misinformation.

Again, not everyone is self-hosting only for learning and experimentation only. Making a deliberate call that mailing infra might be too hard might be too hard, have too big of a knowledge gap, or is simply not worth the effort is something I’d call more serious than hardlining on “self host everything or stay on gmail”, especially in the case of mailing, where it’s pretty much impossible to self-host on your own hardware / network.

Full instructions do not reduce any effort or resources involved or complexity of the problem. And the problem is that you’re suddenly moving from “I’m hosting a few services” to being balls deep in networking, dns, and a deceivingly easy protocol which blows up in complexity due to being federated and absolutely dominated by big providers at the same time, and all of the extensions for security.

Except for learning, self-hosting serves a purpose. You might want privacy, you might not want to be dependent on corpo infra or external services at all, you might want to host something that offers something more or better than a SaaS solution - but first of all, it needs to work. For mail, you gain none of those. Self-hosting on your own hardware (or rather network) is pretty much impossible, so you’re reliant on a hosting provider at least. There is basically zero difference in functionality between mailing servers or providers. Sure, you’ll run into problems when copy pasting instructions, but those problems will break the service. Fucking up your DNS or networking will break your whole server. At the same time, while failing silently it will costs a magnitude of effort more than most other usually self-hosted services.

Because it works for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you have the experience, and done it at least once successfully, it’s “easy”. Compared to the average self-hosted configure and run a docker image and reverse proxy it’s objectively harder to run.

The issue is not running the individual components or servers, but that there’s infrastructure and to some extent crypto involved, which is just outside of the comfort zone for many. You tried to host it like any other thing on your homelab? Nope. Has your VPS been involved in spam? Enjoy the blacklist you’ll never find out about and the debugging why it doesn’t work. No experience in managing your DNS? Have fun getting DMARC/DKIM/SPF to work.

Theres just way more stuff that needs to be done, and a lot of it will fail silently.

The easiest way would be to set up caddy to use acme on the servers, and never care about certificates again. See https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https.

If you insist on your centralized solution, which is perfectly fine imo, just place the certificates to a directory properly accessible to caddy, and make sure to keep the permissions minimal, so that the keys are only accessible by authorized users.

If the certificates are only for caddy, there’s no reason to mess around in system folders.