Comment by rahimnathwani
3 days ago
Maybe those folks buying Mac Minis to host at home weren't so silly after all. The exposed ones are almost all hosted on VPSs which, by design, have publicly-routable IP addresses.
But anyway I think connecting to a Clawdbot instance requires pairing unless you're coming from localhost: https://docs.molt.bot/start/pairing
The silly part is buying a $600 Mac mini when any $100 NUC or $50 raspberry pi or any cheap mini PC off of eBay will do the job exactly the same.
The silly part is buying a $50 raspberry pi, then storage and memory and so on, when a $200 used M1 Mac mini is plug-and-play.
$40 used ThinkCentre Tiny is also plug and play! Or Dell Optiplex Micro, practically the same thing.
The silly part is buying a $200 used M1 Mac mini, when a $5 Arduino clone can be used to blink an LED.
Oh wait—that’s the silly part
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Doesn't Moltbot specifically require MacOS for iMessage, Apple reminders, and some other Apple-ecosystem features?
HN is the last place I expected to see someone laugh at self-hosting
If you want iMessage you still need an always-on Mac, whether that's the main moltbot gateway, or the MacOS app running in 'node mode' to allow a moltbot gateway to use it to send/receive iMessages.
I noticed when I was reading Federico Viticci's post about it that he was using telegram, which has much better support for "markdown"-y rendering, which looks a lot nicer than iMessage. And then I thought to myself, why would iMessage actually matter? The only other use-case would be interacting with texts, but almost anyone can tell when someone is using an LLM to text - I feel like our texting styles are so personal, and what is there even to gain from using an LLM just with text messages? So is it even worth it to run on a Mac?
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> need an always-on Mac
Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.
But it is actually a good point to get a Mac Mini instead of a NUC. The Mac Mini is going to deliver better performance per Watt.
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Our SFF HP came out at 150€ with flash storage and 16GB of RAM. I see used M1s for 200-250€ where we live. The only drawback of the M1 is you’d be stuck buying a NAS/DAS for the storage part, whereas the HP has 3 internal SATA ports. Neither option is silly, they have different pros/cons. Managing Linux quirks has gotten frustrating, for example.
depending on how you set up the reverse proxy, clawdbot can think _all_ traffic comes from localhost