I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

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Selfhosting is useful when you either need a lot of storage or a lot of processing power. For example, Kiwix is useful to selfhost on a server because a lot of its content can take up terabytes of storage, which a phone may not have. LLMs are also useful to selfhost because they require a degree of processing power that, again, a phone may not have.

In both cases, there is also a need for perpetual access. If you simply hosted an LLM on your home computer, it wouldn't be very useful to access from your phone since your computer won't be running all the time. So, a separate always-on server is needed.

However, there are some selfhosted software that I don't see a use for. For example, Immich. Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers. Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point. AI image tagging is also something that could be run on-device as well, since it's mostly lightweight (iPhones are capable of it). Having a setup like that also comes with the benefit of automatic backups being completely optional, rather than required.

There's no reasonable need for extra storage or extra processing power needed for that use case, from what I can tell. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually used Immich before, so this is speculation. I apologize if I'm missing something obvious) There's a lot of other selfhosted tools like spotDL which have a selfhosted web UI, but no GUI that can be installed outside of a web browser.

I guess my question is why there are so many selfhosted tools that unnecessarily require being run on a separate device. I do understand the legitimate use cases some of them have, but others seem better off on-device airgapped. This especially became an issue trying to find a notes app for Android that requires no account and runs fully locally, or an RSS reader that loads from the device itself. I found Joplin and Feeder or Read You as the software for each of those. I don't like "server-based" selfhosting for things that could be done from the device itself.

I'm sorry if this turned into a rant. If someone could help me understand, I would appreciate that very much.

Cheers!

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In your example Immich is an alternative to Nextcloud that is more specialized. If you already run a Nextcloud there is no real need to run Immich indeed.

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I think the point with all of these is that they are "cloud"-based. Except instead of the cloud being someone else's computer, it's your own. Let's take Immich, for example. Sure I could keep all my photos on my phone. But what if I lose or break my phone? What if I have an actual camera with an SD card and I want to offload those photos? Self-hosting lets me keep a backup. I can set up a server with redundant drives that itself backs up to a server in another location with its own separate drives. Thus, I have my own safe cloud storage.

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If every app had their own selfhosted backup solution, it wouldn't be very convenient. I'd think it better to run Nextcloud to back everything up than to deal with setting each backup solution up individually. Is there a major benefit to Immich that I'm missing?

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If all you need is a photo backup solution (and for many people that is true) than Immich is a far more polished and less janky option. Nextcloud is a typical "Jack of all trades, master of none" type of software.

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Sure, and I agree backups are important. I still don't like that Immich requires another server to function in the first place. It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn't have experience in selfhosting. I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so, that way if my phone is ever lost or stolen I still have a backup without the need for a server.

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That's a good point, and I agree. I still wish Immich could function as an on-device photo app, with selfhosted backups being optional.

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They’re meant to be run on a local server ie whatever other computer you have that runs 24/7

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I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.

Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.

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I run both ... nextcloud is very inconvenient for finding stuff and slow in loading. I still use nextcloud to sync, but immich for tagging and displaying, because it's much faster and better in UI etc.

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I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.

Would something like Syncthing work for this instead?

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I agree that self hosting is useful for things that require lots of storage or processing power, but there are more reasons to self host than that. For me, it's more that I want control of certain services, and that I want a central place to manage them from. For example, I personally host an Immich server on a local rig in my home along with a number of other services that don't require enormous amounts of storage or processing power.

Home Assistant, Jellyfin and the Arr stack, Audiobookshelf, Koel, Immich, etc. Things like Jellyfin require large amounts of space, sure. But things like the Home Assistant, Arr stack, Audiobookshelf, and Koel are more for convenience than anything else. Going back to the Immich example, this provides me with a way to centralize my family's photos while on our local network, or a VPN, and allows us to share them publicly with others using explicit links. It keeps our personal photos out of the corporate cloud and provides mostly the same functionality as though I were using an alternative mainstream product. That and if someone yeets my phone into the ocean for some reason, I still have all my photos.

Having explicit control of these services and the underlying content is probably more of a reason to self host than anything else for me. S3-type bucket storage and spot processing power is relatively cheap these days. Privacy and control is not.

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There are three reasons that I can think of:

Privacy
Collaboration
Accessibility / cost

Privacy.
This is obvious. People don't want their private information to be sold by corporations or scraped by AI.

Collaboration
To share information with others, while maintaining point 1, people have to self host. Say, you want to archive a bunch of photos for personal viewing then you can store them anywhere you like. But if you want to share them with family, a self hosted solution is the way to go.

Accessibility / cost
People want to do things for free. Many applications offer free version or demo, but features are often limited and you can't really customize them to your own needs. In addition, applications often adopt a subscription model these days and people don't like that.

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So the difference here is you are manually doing a thing for your backups. Using a self hosted server and something like immich will seamlessly do it for you. If you drop your phone in the toilet and it breaks, the photos you took since your last manual backup would be saved.

Immich isnt meant to be a photo gallery viewer primarily, it is meant to be a self hosted photo backup service to replace stuff like icloud or google photos. So yeah, dont recommend it as a gallery viewer, recommend it as a selfhosted image backuo service.

I self host a jellyfin service on my nas, and keep all my movies and shows on that nas. I wouldnt be able to fit all that stuff on my phone.

I worked in an office that was paying out the ass for google drive. Setting up a self hosted nextcloud was a great solution and saved them a bunch of money, and still worked as a hands off "cloud solution"

If you dont want to run a separate machine to self host some services thats fine, you dont need to do it. its not for everyone. But plenty of people have reasonable motives for doing it.

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I personally use Syncthing for backing up gamesaves to my home server and it works great. While it would technically work for this application, it would be significantly more work to set up and maintain for photo management than just kicking up an Immich Docker container. Go check out their docs if you haven't already, it's pretty sweet how easy it is to manage stuff with Immich

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and allows us to share them publicly with others using explicit links.

That's something I hadn't considered. I'm somewhat used to everything being completely local, no exceptions. It's why I started selfhosting so late, I never saw much of a point to it. I also don't feel completely comfortable opening any part of my home internet to the public, but I'm sure there's safe ways of going about it.

Another bias of mine is having a lot of compartmentalization. For example, none of my desktop account credentials are stored on my phone's password manager, and vice versa. If one device is compromised, I want to isolate the risk as much as I can. That also means that if I were to ever set up a movie library, for example, I would want to keep those isolated per-device as well.

Backups are a bit of a special case. You can either selfhost an automatic cloud backup, or use something simple like a USB stick you manually backup to. Besides that, though, I would argue you maintain more control over software that doesn't rely on an external device to begin with. I gave examples, such as Aves, Joplin, or Feeder. If those are on my phone only (and properly backed up), I maintain full control knowing that I don't need to rely on my own server at home to manage the data that I have in my pocket.

This has helped me see some new benefits of selfhosting, though. I've spent my whole life without a SIM card, so it isn't always easy finding a network (especially a trustworthy one) to connect to on the go to connect to my server with. Even in the moments I could connect to a network, they had heavy censorship (blocked VPNs and certain IP addresses). That's why I like having everything on-device.

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I mentioned in the edit: I'm not asking why things should be selfhosted instead of run on a cloud provider, I'm asking why things are selfhosted on a server that could be run entirely on-device. The latter I argue provides more privacy and less cost. Again, there are some cases as I mentioned in the post where selfhosting on a server is useful (storage or processing power), but I keep seeing a lot of server-based selfhosting that could instead be run on the device itself.

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Why would you need a home server in addition to your day to day desktop computer? I leave my desktop on at all times because it's a Plex/ErsatzTV server, HomeAssistant server, web server for various utilities I've written, etc. It works great.

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On device isn’t always ideal. I don’t use immich because i don’t have a large photo library. But I do use komga. Nextcloud can sort and manage epub/pdf like komga but as poVoq said, the specialized solution is superior

This point is where on device app is not the ideal situation, for me at least. These apps exist. Tachiyomi and the resultant forks can import a local library. And frankly even a somewhat massive local library can fit on a cheap SD card

The point of the server is portability. With this I have portability across my devices. My library, reading status, metadata, etc is available on all devices. I can read a book on my ereader, close it, the status is synced. I can pick up from my laptop and the same thing occurs. I can pick up from my phone, download the book to my device, and keep reading while I’m away from home. If I wanted to I could open remote access to my server and avoid the need for downloading the books but that’s a whole thing

I don’t think it would make sense to run a server solely for this but it’s a service that doesn’t take much in terms of resources and I read a lot.

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I have two devices. How do I view photos from both, together in one library, without running something like Immich on a third device?

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I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting