A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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It's all about privacy.
I am amazed at services offered that run rampant in the home.
My ISP offers fiber. But only if you also sign up for managed wifi where they manage your internal net....no way
I got a quote for solar power....but they must use a 3rd party cloud to manage your power and it uses eth over electrical .... If you use eth over electrical already, then it does whatever it wants in your home network ....no way.
Cell phones? They all go into a guest wifi....not on my home network.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Richard P. Feynman
I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it's nice to have computers seem "fun" again.
At least, that's my perspective.
It's a little bit of everything.
I haven't really dabbled with tech much outside of work since college. This year, I started on a huge journey to change that for a couple of reasons:
I've done all of this in the past 5 months:
This same argument goes for Linux as well. Linux allows you to turn the computer into anything you want it to be!
Recently getting back into Linux, it’s like choose your own adventure in computing. It’s been fun.
Self-housing, Linux, vim; hell, even gardening -- they all fit this saying?axiom? pretty well.
Personally I don't enjoy setting things up. I do enjoy not being tied down to evil corporations.
I do like setting things up.
Then I realise I need to fuck around with DNS to get it working nicely.
hardcode all the ip's!
99% of people want computers to serve them, not to be fun. My SO couldn't care less how much fun I have setting up home assistant. They just want to turn on the lights.
Sure, but did your SO set up home assistant?
No. They just want to buy an Apple home thingy 🥹
Yeah that kinda enforces their point.
Well, yes, most people want computers to be unnoticable and boring. I agree, we need more boring tech that just does a job and doesn't bother us. That said, plenty of people find self-hosting to be fun - your SO and mine excepted, of course.
most people want computers to be unnoticable and boring. I agree, we need more boring tech
professional UI designers don't seem to agree. they always feel the urge to come up with the next worst design
For me it's not even about better or worse, but about different. For them it's a nice iteration after many years, but for be it is one of the dozens of apps I use irregularly that suddenly behaves and works different and forces me to relearn things I don't have any gain from. Since each of the different apps get that treatment every once in a while, I end up having to adjust all the damn time for something else.
I would really like we could go back to functional applications being sold as is without forced updates. I do not need constant changes all the time. WinAmp hasn't changed in 20 years and still does exactly what it is supposed to. I could probably spin up an old MS Word 2000 and it would work just like it did 20 years ago.
Many modern apps however change constantly. No wonder they all lean towards subscriptions if they "have to" work on it all the time. But I, as a user, don't even want that. I want to buy the thing that does what it's supposed to and then I want it to stay that way.
People are looking to reclaim their agency and autonomy, we over relied on corpos and they used that as opportunity to price gouge us.
Escaping vendor lock-in. It's why people hate the cloud when it used to be the answer for everything. You make a good product that can only be used with your hardware/software, whatever, and people run from that shit because it's abused more often than not.
Apple is the biggest example of this. Synology is getting worse and worse. Plex not far behind either.
No way, plex is completely enshitified.
I recently discovered that Plex no longer works over local network, if you lose internet service. A) you can't login without internet access. B) even if you're already logged in, apps do not find and recognize your local server without internet access. So, yeah, Plex is already there.
I try to explain this to the plex cultists and they usually have one of two responses;
Takes every ounce of willpower I have to not eye roll.
KODI is calling.
A lot of people that run Plex have a Jellyfin container on standby, or they'll use Plex for friends and family and use JF at home.
What is the point of Plex? I just went straight for Jellyfin and it does everything I need and then some. Is it just that people went with Plex initially and then stuck with it as it got enshittified?
Plex has better security, federates and shares with other plex servers and generally is less hands-on for transcoding.
But, I don't use it. I like Jellyfin. It's free and while it may lack a few features, it isn't worse by any measure.
Plex has better security, federates and shares with other plex servers and generally is less hands-on for transcoding.
Regarding security, it'd be interesting to see how secure it actually is. Yeah, the individual endpoints might be protected better, but is Plex the company maybe a single point of failure?
even if you're already logged in, apps do not find and recognize your local server without internet access.
You set your server in those app's settings to not use direct connect and thus they are being routed through Plex's servers
When you select your Plex libraries from the drop-down there are usually 2 options, one will be the local IP and say (direct), that's always the best choice if you're able
I just turned off my Internet connection to my Chromecast and tested, no issues with accessing my media
I'll take another look, but I didn't see any such setting when I was trying to diagnose. And I haven't changed any Plex settings since the last time we had an internet outage and it worked properly, just a month or two ago.
I wanted to ask where the border of selfhosting is. Do I need to have the storage and computing at home?
Is a cheap VPS on hetzner where I installed python, PieFed and it's Postgres database but also nginx and letsencrpt manually by mydelf and pointed my domain to it, selfhosting?
I would say yes, it's still self-hosting. It's probably not "home labbing", but it's still you responsible for all the services you host yourself, it's just the hardware which is managed by someone else.
Also don't let people discourage you from doing bare-metal.
Interesting distinction. I use a small managed vps, but didn't consider that self-hosting, personally. I do aspire to switch to a homelab and figure out dynamic DNS and all that one day.
That's actually a good point, self hosting and home lab are similar things but don't necessarily mean the same thing
It’s self hosting as long as you are in control of the data you’re hosting.
Good for her