#selfhosting

The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not just tenants. To plant things in soil we control, and to tend them. Because if we don’t, the only record that we were here will be someone else’s ad inventory, and when the ads move on, we’ll move with them—into the quiet, unmarked graveyard of the deleted.

Lightweight Music Server. Access your self-hosted music using a web interface.

Funkwhale supports a subset of the Subsonic API. This enables you to use Subsonic apps to stream your Funkwhale content. Check out the guides in this section to manage your Subsonic access.

music streaming server / free-software subsonic server API implementation

A tiny Subsonic + Jellyfin server + S3 API written in Rust

Cloud services are not forever.

ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.

A minimalist, self-hosted diary and journaling web app.

There is a darker, conspiratorial interpretation of today’s hardware trends that reads less like market economics and more like a rehearsal for a managed future. Businesses, having discovered that ownership is inefficient and obedience is profitable, are quietly steering society toward a world where no one owns compute at all, where hardware exists only as an abstraction rented back to the public through virtual servers, SaaS subscriptions, and metered experiences, and where digital sovereignty, that anyone with a PC tower under their desk once had, becomes an outdated, eccentric, and even suspicious concept.

Identity-aware VPN and proxy for remote access to anything, anywhere.

Frigate is an open source NVR built around real-time AI object detection. All processing is performed locally on your own hardware, and your camera feeds never leave your home.

With their remote monitoring, motion detection, PTZ control, and data storing provisions, Network Video Recorders are a great way to turn a bunch of IP cameras into a full-fledged surveillance system. Better yet, the self-hosting landscape is chock-full of cool NVR solutions that not only let you manage your security footage, but also preserve your privacy and money while doing so. I’ve tinkered with a handful of these tools over the last couple of months, and while some may specialize in certain aspects, Frigate is ideal for building a DIY security camera system.

The biggest win? I own my identity now. My email address is on my domain. My files are on my server. My passwords are in my vault. If any single service disappears tomorrow, I can move. That's the freedom I was looking for.

A growing number of people are discovering that hosting their own services - from a personal cloud to a blog or social platform - is empowering, surprisingly affordable, and a brilliant way to learn how the internet actually works.

This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use. And they're free to use other products with the data. This helps encourage data format standards. It's why the PC software market was so much more vibrant than the web developer market.

If it were a web app instead, I could drop the developer membership, but I’d have to pay way more money for web and database hosting. Probably need a CDN too, and who knows what else. (I don’t have recent web app experience, so I don’t even know what my requirements would be, but I’m sure they’d cost substantially more than a couple hundred bucks a year.) I could charge for NetNewsWire, but that would go against my political goal of making sure there’s a good and free RSS reader available to everyone.

In this (very long post) I will be demonstrating how I have setup my self-hosted Forgejo runners at home using Docker Compose, Docker-in-Docker and a bonus LXC. To demonstrate with a practical example, I will be building an Ansible Execution environment, to be used in my home lab automation. There will be two versions of it: a single node, and a dual node build. Both will result in the images for two platforms/architectures (AMD64 and ARM64).

Pinepods is a complete podcast management system that allows you to play, download, and keep track of podcasts you enjoy. All self hosted and enjoyed on your own server!

A self-hosted platform for automatically aligning ebooks and audiobooks for immersive reading.

The mighty, self-hostable Git server for the command line🍦

My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us. And this week, I want to share with you how I did it, what I learned, and why I think self-hosting is NOT the future we should be fighting for.

A modern, fully static, fast, secure fully proxied, highly customizable application dashboard with integrations for over 100 services and translations into multiple languages. Easily configured via YAML files or through docker label discovery.

LunaSea is a fully featured, open source self-hosted controller focused on giving you a seamless experience between all of your self-hosted media software remotely on your devices.

So what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different; that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of uptime:

Never build your house on someone else’s land.

Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.

I wrote code (in PHP) to import my old bookmarks. And you didn’t misread that, it’s 28,000 links over the last 20 years. They come from my original links blog, and from Delicious, and from Instapaper, and from Twitter back when I backfilled those shared links into Pinboard, which I then backfilled into my link blog database. It’s a lot of things, but really, it’s straightforward from a programming point of view. It’s a simple POST to the REST API which Linkding provides by default. I have shared most of the code I wrote as a Gist in GitHub. It includes code in PHP to convert exported CSV from Instapaper to a JSON format that my poster code can use. And over the last 2 days and over many hours, every few seconds a link would be posted. And as of now, it’s finished.

Our systems do not need to be high-maintenance, intensive on resources and energy needs. They don’t have to answer every request with availability and latency that measures up to however many nines or zeroes are the current industry standard. They have to attend to the needs of those who are using them, which can be much less demanding. We can run both infrastructure and software at more human scales and learn other ways of growing or shrinking, and we can also scale to high performance and availability too. This is what the concept of a network enables after all, but it is often used to centralize and create dependency instead.

From hosting email and simple HTML websites in my youth to the current attempts at decentralized Twitter- or YouTube-like platforms, the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience. The primary “feature” of self-hosting is, for most, a fatal flaw: it’s a chore. It’s akin to being “free” to change the oil in your car—it’s an option, but not a welcome one for most.

Did you know? You can self-host and/or mirror almost all of Bluesky's infrastructure today!

Highlight:Free and open-source, runtipi lets you install all your favorite self-hosted apps without the hassle of configuring and managing each service. One-click installs and updates for more than 200 popular apps. Free and open-source, Runtipi lets you install all your favorite self-hosted apps without the hassle of configuring and managing each service. One-click installs and updates for more than 80 popular apps.

"There is a growing awareness of the need for self-hosted data - the individual should own and control their own stuff."