I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

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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've made a point not to perpetually leave my home computer on simply because frequent restarts are healthy for it. Another reason is compartmentalization. I would want to keep my selfhosted server separate from where I game or browse the internet, if at least to keep it more secure.

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That's a fair point, and I don't suppose Nextcloud or Syncthing would be quite as useful or as designed for photos. Thank you for helping me understand!

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Sounds like you should get a basic low power linux box going!

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In immich I can open the world map and select photos i took in Hungary and Colorado without having to manually tag and manually locate them, and I have thousands of photos from the last 25 years saved and can do this seamlessly by simply uploading them and having my server run a heuristic to automatically do this.

Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?

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Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?

I suppose not. That's a fair point. Although I will mention, if your camera supports it, location metadata can be embedded automatically. Aves and many other gallery apps support viewing photos with location data on the map.

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Why are frequent restarts healthy? Do you mean at a hardware level or for the OS?

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I don't use gallery apps on my phone because I don't have the space for terabytes of photos and videos on my phone, but my server does. So Aves is useless to me.

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Both. If your hardware isn't designed like a server to run 24/7 it can be unhealthy for it, especially if it isn't properly maintained. It can cause wear to it. As far as the OS, restarting is good to clear caches, fully install some software, and keep the system sanitary overall.

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I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so

Is that automated? It sounds kind of tedious, and it would be easy to lose data if something goes wrong in between those few days.

Some of the motivation behind self hosting is that there is one source of truth that is easy to manage and make backups for (a server or servers). Android backups in particular are kind of notoriously fragile (especially if you're avoiding Google services) so it's simpler to have the data stored on a server. Then I can wipe or lose my phone with impunity without really worrying about losing data, because it's handled elsewhere.

Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).

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Is that automated?

If I left the USB stick plugged in constantly, but then it wouldn't be very useful I guess.

I've only recently started selfhosting on my own, so I am still quite new.

Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).

I'll check it out, thank you!

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I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting