What I Self Host
fredrikmeyer.net
fredrikmeyer.net
If we’re going to talk about self hosting music, I’d like to mention Roon, which is loved by audiophiles. It aims at creating a magazine like experience for navigating and discovering music. Been using it since COVID and it’s completely transformed my experience of listening to something else than the same playlist over and over.
It slightly more than just an API though: one can't aggregate directly from the Spotify API.
Loved the UI photos, but I guess I'll continue with Navidrome + Feishin/Symfonium.
You can take that risk if you want to. I prefer to not make myself dependent on a single vendor whenever possible.
It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.
And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.
Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
But aside from that, inside any metro area even a 200ms or so buffer would likely suffice for streaming music.
200ms and even n+1 won't cut it for a subway, a semi-basement pub, a tunnel, a train or an airplane trip, a hike, a countryside visit, etc.
I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.
> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).
So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred.
I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.
For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.
I just tried to explain to you why I DO THIS.
I'm curious to know why you think this way of doing is "correct"? I like reading my RSS feeds on my phone. And on my laptop. And on my tablet, sometimes.
In any case, if you're reading on your phone it's most likely because you're addicted to your phone and open the app impulsively. Consider that.
You do know we can infer unwritten things from context, right?
> I say that newsboat is the best thing
> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?
These sound like you believe your way of doing is the correct one and people reading on multiple devices are wrong. You don't have to say it for readers to understand it this way.
- my own email server
- my own files sharing service
- service for cardDav, CalDav etc.
- service for editing my own office files on mobile
- notes that are synchronized
- streaming of movies and music
- build and git server
- my own smart home service
- notification service
- chat
- VPN
- desktop sharing service
- my own DNS for blocking adds
- and others
Anyway the nginx reverse proxy is enough for those. You can login and listen to your own music or watch your movies anywhere.
Checkout for example here: https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs
Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore
The only thing that might make sense to be local is media, but only if you don't share with someone else and you want to maintain an offline copy of your library on each device you use.
In general, it's stuff that needs to be shared or needs to run 24/7. A lot of that just doesn't make any sense as a desktop application.
All rationalization aside, it's a hobby. It's fun. People spin up hulking enterprise gear at home and run jellyfin just for kicks. It's not supposed to be at all practical or to even make sense. It's silly nonsense on purpose.
New to me might not mean new to others.
Self hosting is not valued on what someone else self-hosts, it's about what you self host that's valuable to you.
Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted
TLDR: they don't differentiate on whether you own the hardware or not.
SaaS is definitely not you running stuff you control or could move anywhere.
If it's a buck standard linux box, yeah that's self hosting!
My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.
About DDOS, you should not your server directly connected to the internet. Use some router or managed switch first. Usually it have already some kind of protection on whatever device is connected to your internet provider infrastructure.
Another question is why would anybody DDOS you? You are not important enough. When I bought domain and connected it to my VPS - I got almost instantly visitors (probably bots looking for new domains being registered) trying bruteforce an access. And I almost instantly blocked Root login and Password auth. They were still trying to login. So I moved the port to higher one. It was calm for few months and then they found new port and again tried to ram it down. So I blocked IPs only to predefined set.
It was exactly the same when I opened my server to the internet with new domain. From that point of view it does not matter if this is your machine, VPS or dedicated server on some rack somewhere. You are responsible for its security.
But it was fun to and educational to build and could pretty easily be extended to add more features.
I would recommend just going for it if you are interested in writing one. It's not as hard as it sounds.
PS. Your app's name kavita - does it mean poem/poetry or it means something else?
1. siyuan - a lightweight note-taking website like obsidian
2. readeck - a lightweight bookmark website scrapes original page to the local server while keeping the original formatting.
3. leantime - a lightweight project management website
Been colocating for 10 years now, the best of both worlds.
Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.
Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.
WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]
One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.
EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘self-drive’ my own car! (By which I mean that I employ an agency to provide a driver to drive a car for me, which I rent!)” or “I self-grow and self-harvest all my own food! By which I mean that I pay a farmer to grow food and harvest it for me.”
Words have meaning.
(Further: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240357>)
It seems everyone draws the line of "self-hosting" differently. For some, "self-hosting" could be running Wordpress at DigitalOcean. For others, self-hosting means using your residential internet connection and having the hardware at home. I'm not sure one is more "correct" than the other, just different perspectives.
No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
Words change meaning frequently throughout history, depending on how they are (mis)used. Or they can change meaning depending on context or part of the country/world.
https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-...
Sometimes drastically.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_...
> Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
I do agree with you that it makes it harder, but communication does depend on more than just the words.
Good example of words losing their meaning. “Enshittification” is barely an infant as a word and it has a very specific meaning, but people are already using to mean “something I dislike”.
It doesn't mean the opposite. People misuse it a lot in that way, but they are quite wrong.
You are advocating for prescriptivism, but descriptivism is a perfectly valid approach to language.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/descriptive-vs-presc...
We all use plenty of words by their “wrong” meaning, because they changed over time and before we were born.
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
I bet they met a bunch of interesting people along the way.
Managing your own hardware can be fun and rewarding but it isn't actually required for the original goal of regaining control over your digital life. And it's not like if you start with a VPS you can never move to your own hardware in case you find building on someone else's service too limiting.
- Power + cooling, physical security, network. (Old school LAN party)
- Can you access the bare metal OS? (Hetzner/OVH bare metal)
- Can you access a VM and decide what runs on it? (EC2 + associated services, K8s, etc, etc)
- Can you run a function? (Lambda for example)
So the meaning has wandered to something between the first and second, IMO.
Whether that's reasonable, well, I kinda liked the underlayer and thought it was part of a good education. But not everyone agrees.
That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.
Though I guess I missed "on a server"
Fair! Not everyone on HN is a programmer, but there is overrepresentation.
> Though I guess I missed "on a server"
Yes, that’s what I was thinking was missing.
Self-host to me is a verb, which mean you're running the service, regardless of what hardware it's on. On-prem is better descriptive word for physical hardware.
On my home hardware I keep things like multiple copies of my photos and documents, as well as experimenting a bit with open LLMs etc.
On the rented servers, I host websites, PeerTube, Forgejo, and keep copies of some data I downloaded from elsewhere.
I’ve also previously hosted email on rented servers. Both on rented hardware and on rented VPSes. For the past few years I haven’t bothered with hosting email myself. I use iCloud provided email instead.
Sometimes I upload videos to my PeerTube instance. Sometimes I upload videos to TikTok.
I don’t have some grand vision of self-hosting everything at home. It is impractical, and comes with its own set of drawbacks. Things that only serve myself and my family go on my hardware at home. Things that I want others to be able to reach go on the rented servers. And other times like with email and TikTok I use services where I have no control whatsoever over what the service provider does with my data.
If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on.
You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. Same goes for anything else you set up and manage, regardless of whether it’s running on bare metal or in a VPS, and regardless of whether the computer it runs on is in your home or rented from someone else.
Neither will I. It is an endeavor worthy of praise.
> And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on.
This is where I will disagree and stand fast. If you do not “host” it yourself, you are not “self-hosting”. You might be maintaining it. You might be administrating it. But you are not hosting it.
> You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home.
I agree, and it is certainly something I wish that more people would attempt.
> And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email.
It may be said to be “self-administrated” or “self-maintained”. But it is not “self-hosted”.
You're welcome to do that but you're wrong as far as the majority of selfhosters are concerned. Spend time on https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ for more information about how widely people define it.
Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.
(Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
But it is a bare metal server from Hetzner auction that I got for cheap and it now hosts an entire family&friends cloud for 10-ish people.
The new definition of "self-hosting" is that you play any part in a piece of software that you use (if I click the "install wordpress button in cPANEL, am I self-hosting?), and the new definition of "bare-metal" is "computer." It's just weird. How can you employ a webhost in order to self-host? How can it be bare-metal if it's hosted within an OS that completely abstracts the hardware?
I suspect non-technical people just wanted to fluff their qualifications, and the companies who host for them wanted to help.
Perhaps you care about qualifications, but others just care about being in control of the servers they depend on and having options when the providers helping to run those servers become unreliable and choosing the most cost-effective option to achieve that. Unless you have an actual argument why the distinction matters besides "it allows the plebes to play" then few will care about what you think the term "self-hosted" should mean - even more so when you yourself still depend on your ISP and power company.
if it's convenient to run mastodon on hetzner, that's STILL self hosting; because you /can/ move your app IN ITS ENTIRETY from any computer to any other.
HomeLab elites really are the most insufferable people out there.
I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.
I did self host on my own hardware for a long, long time. But convenience won.
I had built myself a massive beast. A Xeon board I had purchased cheaply for $200 bucks from a friend. I put a water cooler(OEM from Intel) and clocked that sob from 2.6GHz to 4GHz. I quickly clocked it down back to 2.6GHz. It never hit temperatures above 30 again.
I installed 24GB RAM, which was the maximum. I installed it in a 3U chassi with the max possible 3.5” hot swap slots. I think 16?
I used FreeBSD with ZFS to run a bhyve virtualisation platform. It was a lot of fun.
Similarly the core of your 'self-farming' analogy is the direct management of the crops. The involvement of others in demolishing existing structures, erecting fences, or managing water resources on the land is of little consequence.
Of course, some might argue that unless the farm is directly managed, it does not constitute self-farming.
> Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control.
> The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines.
Zero here.
> If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”.
Minor dependency on OCI but no down time at all for any services I run.
I think in your analogy a VPS is more like renting a (normal) car rather than buying one - you're still in control over where it goes and its up to you to obey the traffic laws but if there are any major issues that are not your fault it's up to the rental company to make sure you get a replacement.
I'm curious what your goal is with your language crusade? Being precise with your language can be important when the distinction matters, but does it really matter here?
> If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”.
What if it didn't have cloud in its name when I signed up but some marketing bozo adjusted the description since then? Did it stop being self hosting even though nothing technical about the setup changed.
I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.
What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).
Me too, but writing software that does whatever user tells it to do, in a consistent and robust way, is very hard. Making it accessible and developing good UX for that kind of software is even harder. This is why a lot of heavily-customizable software, IMO, is so hard to use and maintain in the long run.
On the other hand, if the developer, who is by definition immersed in the domain, can use their experience to make good decisions and enforce them with limitations, the resulting software has a higher chance to be easier to use and easier to maintain.
I tend to gravitate towards "opinionated" software with very limited customizability because in my experience that kind of software is of better quality, on average.
Compliment in that it’s supposed to mean something akin to principled I guess