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What I Self Host

fredrikmeyer.net

41–50 of 149 posts

Re: What I Self Host

#41
post #30
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Paraphrased] Words mean different things to different people! Anyone can choose any definition they want! No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.

> No, words have quite definite meanings. 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-...…

Literally not meaning literally is literally an example of the enshitification of language.

Re: What I Self Host

#42
post #4

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…

I rent a couple of bare-metal servers from Hetzner, and I have physical servers at home.

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.

Re: What I Self Host

#43
post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

Specifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it.

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.

Re: What I Self Host

#44
post #4

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…

If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere.

Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.

Re: What I Self Host

#45

Self hosting is great. The examples in this article are not exactly shining examples: an API that shows your Spotify stats? 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 th…

I like listening to the same playlist over an over. Magazine for music? I would like to have time for magazines. But it would be about electronic and RC-models.

Re: What I Self Host

#46
post #4

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…

What do you call what the author is doing?

Self-admin

Re: What I Self Host

#48
post #38

Linkding is really nice. I have a bunch of bookmark shortcuts saved that I still need to import into it.

I've taken this one step further: I self-host archivebox which is basically a self-hosted wayback machine. That way my bookmarks are immune to articles being taken down / moved / modified.

Re: What I Self Host

#50
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, words have quite definite meanings. 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-...…

Literally not meaning literally is literally an example of the enshitification of language.

> the enshitification of language

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”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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