I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

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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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To me, the appeal is that my workflow depends less on my computer and more on my ability to connect to a server that handles everything for me. Workstation, laptop or phone? Doesn't matter, just connect to the right IPs and get working. Linux is, of course, the holy grail of interoperability, and I'm all Linux. With a little bit of set up, I can make a lot of things talk to each other seamlessly. SMB on Windows is a nightmare but on Linux if I set up SSH keys then I can just open a file manager and type sftp://<hostname> and now I'm browsing that machine as if it was a local folder. I can do a lot of work from my genuinely-trash laptop because it's the server that's doing the heavy lifting

TL;DR -

My workflow becomes "client agnostic" and I value that a lot

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Powercycling is not healthy lol

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Thanks reasonable! That does make me realize how different my workflow is. My philosophy is compartmentalizing everything. What I do on my phone stays on my phone. What I do on my desktop stays on my desktop. What I do on my laptop stays on my laptop. I've never really had the need for anything more until now. Then again, I've also never had the resources to selfhost until now.

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I found this article explaining some of the benefits. Let me know if I'm wrong, I'm always open to learning!

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Immich is just much nicer, i can make an album and share it with my wife and she can see that on her phone right away since I set her phone to use immich as well.

I used to use nextcloud for images but it was kind of weird and didn't have a lot of the features, then randomly one day while I was at a work event nextcloud just decided to start syncing everything to my phone and killed my battery.

After that I tried photo prisim but that didn't have a proper sync app and I had to use other work arounds and I ended up just not liking the way it sorted my photos, immich to me just makes sense and was much easier to setup.

Also like everyone else has mentioned being hardware agnostic is great, I can plug my phone in to a monitor with a keyboard and mouse and vpn in to a VM on my server and I have a full fledged desktop experience where I can play games or edit videos and photos

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The purpose of most of these apps is to be able to use them on multiple devices. If I had immich entirely running on my phone (this is not actually feasible regardless) how do i access my images from my computer.

Also many people have multiple users. A family could have all their images on one immich server and be able to share images with each other easily.

On jellyfin for example, I can play any of my media on someone elses TV as long as they have Chromecast. Not possible if its all just kept locally in a folder on a computer

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I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting