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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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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The thing that did me in was 2 things
I now had nowhere to upload my own music, and Danger 5 at the time was literally unobtainable legally unless you bought super expensive used region locked DVDs
I had enough and spun up a plex server and now here we are
Privacy was my breaking point, and it happened recently.
Been using the internet for 26 years now. Never particularly had a problem with spam, despite never really caring about what happens with my data. I just never got any. Shared everything with google, signed up to all sorts with the same e-mail and same phone number and card, no VPNs or anything, same few passwords.
A couple months ago, that all changed when something somewhere leaked my phone number and e-mail, and it's all turned to quite a mess.
So I've reset, opened a new e-mail, attached that to my own domain name, and further attached that to self-hosted email masks. If I don't like the e-mail provider... plug my domain elsewhere. If I don't like the domain registrar... take my domain elsewhere. And the e-mail masks are infinite. I can spin up unique ones for every service.
I've got a solid password manager that integrates with that so every service gets a unique email and password.
I've got a few really cheap $2 sim cards, and when I need to sign up to certain things, it gets one of them. I'm planning on finding a decent VoIP provider because I can just transfer the numbers to the provider, and will only need to buy a cheap sim on the odd occasion a service doesn't accept it, and then my actual phone will just have a number that absolutely no one is given. Not connected to anything.
I'm struggling to find something like privacy.com for non-US citizens. But once I've found a decent and affordable one, I'll be on that in a moment. This has the added benefit of helping with my budgeting.
And pretty much anything that doesn't need my real name, gets a pseudonym.
For home I've got a decent VPN setup, I've got all sorts of adblocking through pihole and ublock origin.
When I'm done with all this, anything I sign up to should have a unique name, email, password, phone number, and payment card. Nothing to link together in their datasets. Any spam call or email or txt I receive will be very obvious where it came from.
Is it perfect? Nah. Could a bad actor still put 2 and 2 together or are there gaps because I'm still learning? Absolutely. But honestly I'm enjoying the process of learning, so it's worth it.
Having far more fine control over, of all things, email. Being able to operate an entire domain and control what happens with every email address in it. I now have a different email address for every legal entity I interact with, sometimes on a per-interaction basis. If I get spam, I know exactly where they scraped the email address from and I can set that specific email address (plus or minus any other data such as which domain it's coming from) to reject with a custom response or display any other behavior in the email protocol, which is surprisingly extensive once you start looking at it.
I've had a homelab for many years. The drive for me to move to full self hosting everything was icloud photos.
Had to reinstall my Mac, and as part of that I wanted to take a full backup of my photo library. Clicked "download originals"... Failed. Tried again, downloaded 2 and failed. Contacted support and was told it would be investigated. 6 weeks later I finally had access to my photos.
I said to my wife "no company should be able to stop us accessing our own stuff, there's going to be changes". Beyond email (as I hate running mail servers), 3 years later I use zero cloud services for data.
I was born this way. I ran a BBS as a kid in the 80s, way before the internet. (TBBS on a TRS-80). In mid 2000s, I setup a phpBB on some webhost for my hotrod/drag racing friends. I think I finally started hosting it from my house in 2015. My regular Windows 7 desktop running a no-ip DDNS client, with Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox VM, port 80 port-forwarded to it. Good times.
But Radicalized -- it was the events after Jan 6, where AWS/Apple/Google shutdown Parler and some other right-leaning sites. For all the other truly horrible shit that exists on the internet, the speed/way they colluded to shut that shit down was scary. At that point it was crystal clear that the bigs can/will shut you down on a whim and it was imperative to control your own data/infrastructure and having multiple options for connectivity and key service providers.
AI, ironically. specifically, my data being used to train big models without my consent (or, sneakily un-opt-out-able consent by using services online). it's been accelerating the enshittification of everything by a ton. self-hosting has been a nice reprieve honestly.
As someone else mentioned, I just got sick and tired of online 'service' companies seeing me as a product or as a 'means to an end' that only has to be manipulated or prodded to get the result THEY are after.
Years ago, I saw that celebrities were getting PAID to wear fashion but normal chumps like me were wearing brands from head to toe trying to identify with that 'cool factor.'
Now, I try not to wear shirts or hats with logo's, etc... even the sports teams I like. Same, with few exceptions.
And I hate that so many apps are just vehicles used to market to me so they can grab MY data for free! Hey, if you want my data, make me an offer on the free market! I want the same opportunities offered to the rich and famous.
And lastly, I agree with someone who mentioned streaming services and their offerings which are diminished and constricted to 'encourage' you to 'level up' for services that used to be included at the level you signed up for or paid for.
As I got older it seemed to me like all the various streaming services like Netflix and Spotify and Stadia (and its failed predecessors) were efforts at the eradication of the very concept of ownership. The shows and movies on Netflix don't offer residuals to the actors or other production workers. Spotify doesn't pay shit for the musicians on the platform.
The whole situation just looks bleak for everyone (except for the MBAs and shareholders) but especially the people producing the content. I'm happy to buy digital media if I can download and it keep it offline DRM-free. I will pay money for that kind of product because I get to keep it.
I don't really see it as radical, I think it's conservative. For ~80 years people kept their own media, and they loved it (photo books, slide shows, album collections). Relatively recently subscription capitalism has tried to disrupt that, and people generally hate it. It certainly doesn't seem to make them feel good, anyway.
I just think we can return to the normal, better way, so I do.
Love this post. Good example of why empowerment matters.
Everything going SaaS. You want me to pay for the service AND sell my data. That’s a no from me dawg.
This happened to me too. I had over 1000 creations published in Sporepedia and when I changed my computer I decided to just re-download them from the servers instead of copying them from the old pc, but they were almost all gone
Apple's near-adoption of NeuralHash.
For years I was comfortable with using big tech companies that had strong tech credentials and a level of trust in the community for implementing things well, securely, and in a way that preserves privacy and respect for the user. Closed systems provided by them were therefore trustworthy to me, having faith that the world-class security professionals and software developers and product owners were all implementing things well, even though I had only limited direct visibility of that. Apple in particular had a reputation for having the most respect for users and their privacy.
Then NeuralHash broke the spell for me. I had an epiphany, a sudden realisation that the untrustworthiness I knew existed in other companies existed in these ones too. I switched to a firm belief that if it's possible for a company to do something naughty with your data, then on a long enough timeline it's inevitable that they will.
I resolved then to avoid big tech wherever I can, and where I can't I try to implement things in a way such that it isn't ever possible for them to do nasty things with my stuff. I've de-Googled, de-Appled, and de-Amazoned, and returned to having a strong emphasis on managing my privacy and taking ownership of as much of what I use as I can.
Looking back I think that Google Reader going away was probably my first motivation to host services myself as opposed to just storing files on my network.
I had a little Synology at the time that I was just using as a NAS but when Google Reader when away I fired up FreshRSS I believe and started doing it myself.
I don't actually run an RSS reader server now and I suspect they aren't as popular as they were so maybe Google actually was onto something shuttering it HOWEVER we won't give them bonus points for that, just points for getting me into self hosting 😂
The gradual move to lease/rent everything instead of owning it. That's how they keep you consuming and spending money without actually owning anything.
Everyone's always been telling me get netflix, get disney+ for the kids. So what, I can spend 100$+ a month for these services because one show I want is not on this platform?
Fuuuhuuuk this.
Arr is the way.
Also I've been a sysadmin for 10+ years and I just enjoy managing my own production environment for everything from e-mail to media serving.
If I really look back it all started with my own cable modem and router to save $10 a month on my Comcast bill. This led to DD-WRT and eventually OpenWRT on my routers throughout the years.
Then I spun up a media server for all my movies, shows, stand-up comedy specials, music, pictures, etc.
Had to have a hypervisor for virtual machines...
Next came my NVR camera system and VPN because FUCK having my footage ever leave my house.
...to name a few lol.
Almost off topic: You can self host Spore?
It's hard to say exactly what motivated me, I knew there was a few things I wanted, and self hosted options kept popping up, so I went that route.
Gitea, I wanted GitHub like interface, but didn't want my stuff uploaded to open internet, like gitlab. I use Gitea to backup thingiverse models, especially when they seem to 404 randomly over time.
Inventree, inventory management for stuff I use in electronic or 3d printed projects.
Jellyfin media streaming along with books
OpenHAB, honestly this stuff seems way over my head, I wanted to use this for a few things, but I know I wanted to log power consumption of my smart plugs I have for my 3d printers. Idk if it's actually working, I think I am using something java related to save the stuff, but I gotta go through the stuff again.
For me it was the story about a dad who got his entire Google account shut down because a picture got flagged as CP. The dad took Google to court and it was proven that the pictures were taken to send to the pediatrician and were objectively not CP. Google refused to reinstate the account even after he was proven innocent.
After recently having a daughter of my own, I don't want to run the risk of losing all my photos and everything I have in Google, all because Google can't admit they were wrong.
It’s just that now I finally can. Between Tailscale and NixOS, its now fun and easy to set up reproducibly and available from anywhere
Quickbooks and to a lesser degree Windows.
This is around 2000 or so: Quickbooks was keeping customer data, requiring you to keep their service forever. They also got in trouble later on for selling customer data. I noticed that Quickbooks did nothing but make an accountants job easier, so why didnt the accountant pay for it?
In any case, the biggest issue was I hated quickbooks (Intuit) as a company, AND they required a license for each machine it was installed on, requiring either additional licenses or getting people to enter data on the same machine.
I ran a small business that visited clients in many nations, so I learned Linux, built out an accounting tool myself, and then served it as a web page and an X forwarded app to clients anywhere in the field. I started hosting my own website, running my own email, and it just grew from there.
TL;DR: Intuit can suck it. Vendor lock in and vendor rules make me choose to make my own rules.
That's just off the top of my head.
What's your current password manager solution? I just use bitwarden because I read it is open source
Running out of harddrive space
gen x.I grew up owning applications and media.The move to cloud and rent everything is not something im a fan of.The one exception is streaming shows.
The cumulative cost of all these individual file services (iCloud, OneDrive, google drive). I realized I was paying for them all and still running out of space…eventually, I figured there had to be a better way.
Animal agriculture
The number of different subscriptions for not hugely complex services plus I don't need to pay for hosting services when I'm working on hobby projects. Had played with Raspberry pis over the years but picked up a mini pc a year ago and has largely been online and doing various different things ever since. The ease of being able to access services when I'm not at home is great.
For music? Napster/Metallica. They seemed to out of touch and hateful towards a technology. For movies? Netflix dvds via the mail made it so easy to rip and store I couldn’t help myself.
A tp-link wifi plug that wouldn't work if the internet went down.
Zigbee plugs and HA all the way after that!
And I avoid tp-link products with a passion.
You can make those tplink plugs work off-line if you stick some time into it. The zigbee is probably more worthwhile.
I'm old nerd.
It was always this way and no matter how many corpos want to try to take it from us we will just create new spaces.
Growing up with this technology and the freedom of expression/tinkering that old tech gave us, its impossible to let it be control by corporations seeking $$$. Fuck em all. hack the world.
I had to reinstall Onedrive at work. Doing that screwed up so much I spent a total of about 8 hours to get everything working again and 2 more to redo the work that was lost before reinstalling. Now I view anything that I don't control directly as ephemeral.
Isn't that a bit too radical, though? Don't you start feeling like, "if you want to do an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe?"
For me, it's not so much about direct control but that I don't want to lose the option. The way I see it, if a service is built on open standards and is well managed, I don't mind having it run by someone else. But if whatever service you are trying to sell me denies me the option of taking my data and going elsewhere, it's an instant nope for me.
It's maybe very radical in worldview, but not in action. I still use stuff like netflix, spotify and youtube instead of downloading everything and share files through cloud storage, I just view it as something I can enjoy/use now that might not be around in the future. If I really want to keep something, the only things I can trust are myself and FOSS.
A bunch of little things for me, little steps down the road to hell:
That last one was probably the biggest eye-opener. There are so many paid services that are objectively worse than basic free self-hosted services. Wink was ok, but I can do so much more without it. And none of this was hard. I spent hours setting up Jellyfin, but it took less time than for me to work to pay for 6 streaming services. Sure, it doesn't have the latest whatever, but so what? At least I know where to find where Stargate: SG1 is streaming!
Dial up internet I think was the real reason but my first real dive into self hosting was XBMC on the original Xbox. I started softmodding Xboxes as a teenager. The idea of being able to just rip stuff to my xbox and then keep it all there was awesome. I never wanted to have to stream anything because it was impossible.
Even after the 360 came out, the OG got enlisted into just playing music and movies. It'd sit there in the corner just dutifully playing streaming content from a media server. I don't even remember what was out in those days but there was something akin to plex that could stream and would attempt to transcode video.
It was actually the noise all the drives in my desktop PC made. That prompted me to build a NAS to put them in that I could put in the cupboard. The obsession with self hosting just grew out of having that headless Linux machine running all the time and not doing a whole lot.
But I found Linux, the free / open source software community, and the pirate community in the 90's. Since then it's been pretty obvious to me that every computer has an administrator and that I'd prefer if the administrator is me. Stuff like "the cloud" and "apps" isn't going to distract me from that point.
Two things really: Dropbox as an automatic solution for file syncing and sharing; I needed to pay for an upgrade so I switched first to Onecloud and then Nextcloud.
The second was due to my work: I was an academic, teaching mathematics, and we were experimenting with online assessment systems. Most publishers provide one of their own, but then you have issues with contracts, student access etc. For example, a student could get access for one year. But many of our students were part-time, and took 18 months or more. This meant repeated calls to the publishers to issue new access codes. Since I already had a VPS, I put an open source mathematics assessment system on it and we ran it happily for a few years. I didn't mind paying for it myself at the start, considering it experimental, but when the university refused to host it themselves I gave up on it. It was good while it lasted, though.
I now need a decent photo management system (Immich sounds good) and start weaning myself away from Google.
In the early days of Google Drive a few of my files disappeared. I also had a scare where I was temporarily locked out of my account and realized there is no recourse to customer support. Installed OwnCloud soon after.
the passing of the DMCA
Wait…Spore is gone? I got that game forever ago, and due to life haven’t played in probably 15 years….are you telling me I can never play it again?
Self-hosting was the logical progression of using Linux as my primary computing environment for 10+ years.
It all started with my father, who dreamed of re-watching films from his childhood. As it was difficult (impossible) to find them in the shops, I used the alternative method. It all started with collecting old films from his era. For my part, ever since I was a child, I've had this "little voice in my head" telling me "what would happen if one day the suppliers of music, films, books... disappeared (because of politics, war, the end of sales... or whatever). Since then, I've digitally preserved everything I can (I only keep things that are hard to find, useful or that I like). And... mainly because I love technology and discovering all the things people can build with their keyboards.
It all started with a raspberry pi… i wanted to host game servers for me and my friends without having to pay for them. This expanded to plex for movies and bookstack for dnd notes. Now I have so many services that I have to look it up to give you a full list.