this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
314 points (97.6% liked)

Selfhosted

46685 readers
541 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
(page 3) 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 142 points 2 days ago

People are looking to reclaim their agency and autonomy, we over relied on corpos and they used that as opportunity to price gouge us.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Learn Podman since Docker has some licensing restrictions in some cases.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 days ago (10 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Personally, I’d say no. At that point you are administering it, not hosting it yourself.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Your stuff is still in the cloud, so I would say no. It’s better than using the big tech products, but I wouldn’t say it’s fully “self hosted”. Not that that really makes much of a difference. You’re still pretty much in control of everything, so you should be fine.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Where is the tipping point though? If I have a server at my parents house, they live in Germany and I in Korea, does my dad host it then because he is paying for the electricity and the access to the internet and makes sure those things work?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Your parents’ house isn’t the cloud, so yeah, it’s self hosted. The “tipping point” is whether you’re using a hosting provider.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Why wouldn't you just use Docker or Podman

Manually installing stuff is actually harder in a lot of cases

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I did that first but that always required much more resources than doing it yourself because every docker starts it's own database and it's own nginx/apache server in addition to the software itself.

Now I have just one Postgresql database instance running with many users and databases on it. Also just one Nginx which does all the virtual host stuff in one central place. And both the things which I install with apt and manually are set up similarly.

I use one docker setup for firefox-sync but only because doing it manually is not documented and even the docker way I had to research for quite some time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (7 children)

What? No it doesn't... You could still have just one postgresql database if you wanted just one. It is a big antithetical to microservices, but there is no reason you can do it.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Yeah why wouldn't you want to know how things work!

I obviously don't know you, but to me it seems that a majority of Docker users know how to spin up a container, but have zero knowledge of how to fix issues within their containers, or to create their own for their custom needs.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (15 children)

That's half the point of the container... You let an expert set it up so you don't have to know it on that level. You can manage fast more containers this way.

load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I use apps on my phone, but have no clue how to troubleshoot them. I have programs on my computer that I hardly know how to use, let alone know the inner workings of. How is running things in Docker any different? Why put down people who have an interest in running things themselves?

I know you're just trying to answer the above question of "why do it the hard way", but it struck me as a little condescending. Sorry if I'm reading too much into it!

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I’m curious if this community would do a community survey.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ethen Sholly has done surveys before on his website selfh.st

edit: I'm an idiot

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Don’t be hard on yourself.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If it didn’t ask me irrelevant personal information

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›