Good for her
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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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.
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.
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.
My SO watches free tier youtube.
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.
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.
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.
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
Nice! How are you using a chromecast without internet? Mine screams at me to get a google account.
Chromecast w/ google TV, sorry, so like a fire stick but different branding. Once you're signed into apps on it it'll remember you cuz it's a full android device
What!?! Damn. I didn't know it got that enshitty already.
I’d say plex is up there. “Want to use your hardware and bandwidth to view your own files? Pay us!”
Nothing wrong with having to pay for software if the prices are reasonable. It's a product like any other, with real people working on it.
I'm down for paying for a piece of software. I bought a lifetime subscription back in the day I feel like until recently it served me pretty well. And to be fair they are caching the movie database, providing SSL keys, epg, low speed proxy through cgnat for people, there's quite a bit too there cloud operations that they do deserve money for.
What pisses me off is the mining of my watch habits, and the slow and enshitification of features.
14 years of lifetime Plex pass for $75, they don't really owe me anything, But I am moving on.
I'm slowly digging my way out of sights with algorithms, clawing my way out of Google is particularly difficult. I'm considering spinning my own Alexa with whisper
People are looking to reclaim their agency and autonomy, we over relied on corpos and they used that as opportunity to price gouge us.
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?
Self hosting just means maintaining your own Instance of a web service instead of paying for someone else‘s
As long as you dont pay hetzner for an explicit fully maintained Nextcloud server, it dosent matter if the OS you‘re running it on is a VM or a bare bones server
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.
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.
I would say there's no value in assigning such a tight definition on self-hosting--in saying that you must use your own hardware and have it on premise.
I would define selfhost as setting up software/hardware to work for you, when turn-key solutions exist because of one reason or another.
Netflix exists. But we selfhost Jellyfin. Doesn't matter if its not on our hardware or not. What matters is that we're not using Netflix.
It depends who you ask (which we can already tell hehe), but I'd say YES, because you're the one running the show -- you're free to grab all of your bits and pieces at any time, and move to a different provider. That flexibility of not being locked into one specific cloud service (which can suddenly take a bad turn) is what's precious to me.
And on a related note, I also make sure that this applies to my software-stack too -- I'm not running anything that would be annoying to swap out if it turns bad.
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Truly awesome that this hobby is getting coverage! I'm very very lazy when it comes to self-hosting, by far my largest project was moving off Spotify and archiving all my playlists.
Rotating 3 API keys for spotdl and a YTP free trial for that sweet sweet 256kbps AAC then Musicbrainz Picard to label correctly all the music (automatic was nearly almost always wrong), then automating rebuilding the m3u8 playlists followed by the insane work of correcting all the little imperfections. Must've taken me like 2-3 weeks of just working on it most of the day.
But the result? A proper offline music library with all my main playlists with each song at the proper position and order in my playlists with the correct (Spotify) metadata using correct versions of the songs in at least 256kbps AAC (and many cases FLAC and where available non-vinyl hi-res).
Tossed on an old dell workstation I got for £50. Hosting navidrome where my JF, Qbittorrent-nox and Immich live. Using symfonium on my phone. Can access remotely via OpenVPN. Couldn't be happier.
Dude Navidrome is so great. I hooked my my decades worth of music collection up to it and now I can stream b-side tracks and indie bands that weren't on Spotify. Plus when I hit random I know it's actually random and not some algo to sell the newest slop that Spotify is pushing.
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I’m curious if this community would do a community survey.
If it didn’t ask me irrelevant personal information
What’s you favorite color?
Not relevant
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Learn Podman since Docker has some licensing restrictions in some cases.
Quadlet is a game changer
It is less user friendly but theoretically more powerful and secure
The learning curve can be steep but if you have ever worked with config files it isn't bad.
The worst part about quadlets, IMO, is that they don't use the same key words as podman run does. So turning a working podman container into a quadlet can be challenging.
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