I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

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I think selfhost is more useful in a multi-user scenario, for my personal needs I also love Syncthing.

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Lots of people mentioning collaboration / multiple users, yet all your replies seem to completely ignore this aspect. I'm guessing you might live alone and are struggling to imagine some very common use cases here.

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I agree with this comment. As mentioned as answer in the post, to have a backup of these things is a big reason why I chose to selfhost. I had to switch devices (and operating systems) too many times. Moving data around everytime would be a hassle. To have all the important stuff not only stored but also organized and easy to access is very convenient and makes me stop worrying to accidentially lose my phone for example.

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To answer your question, most people don't have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?

Music for example. If I don't want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.

If I don't listen to music at home, then you're right, there's no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.

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Agreed. Do I expect my mom to manually plug in the usb flash? She ain’t have slightest idea of what a file is. Same goes for Nextcloud everything and Syncthing. Setup and done is Immich. The lead dev of Immich explicitly mention his motivation was to make it easy to backup and share pics with his wife and child.

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The misunderstanding seems to be between software and hardware. It is good to reboot Windows and some other operating systems because they accumulate errors and quirks. It is not good to powercycle your hardware, though. It increases wear.

I'm not on an OS that needs to be rebooted, I count my uptime in months.

I don't want you to pick up a new anxiety about rebooting your PC, though. Components are built to last, generally speaking. Even if you powercycled your PC 5 times daily you'd most likely upgrade your hardware long before it wears out.

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What you have missed is the ability to run what ever you need, self hosting is more then just backups and sync.

Some self hosting to self reliant, nextcloud can do way more then just file sync. For example I use it for calendar and contact sync, photo and file backup from my phone, an office suit, RSS server.

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A reason I self-host stuff is privacy. When I host my data it's my data. It's not owned and kept by a billion dollar company somewhere, that is willing to sell it to make a quick buck.

So it's my way of making sure that my data really is my data and that it is only shared with those I want to share it with. Some applications require a server component to achive this (eg Immich), so that's why I self-host those.

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It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting.

You already have plenty of responses, but immich is not an gallery app. I'm in the process of migrating my photo libraries to immich and it's 20+ years of memories. Some are originally taken by film camera and then scanned, others are old enough that camera phones just didn't exist and we had "compact" digital cameras. Then there's photos taken with DSLR and drone and obviously all of the devices have changed multiple times over the years, so relying on just a single device is just not going to work over time.

All of those require some other system to store, organize, back up and enjoy than the device itself. And, as I have family, storing them on just my desktop would mean that no one else around would have easy access to them. And with immich I can easily share photos around when I carry DSLR with me in a family gathering or whatever.

And then there's the obvious matter of having enough storage. Even my desktop doesn't have a spare terabyte right now to store everything, I need the hardware anyways, so it just makes sense to keep them separated from my workstation which I can now do whatever I want with without worrying I'd lose any of those precious memories. And for the server part, I'm having one around anyways for pihole, home assistant, nextcloud to store/back up other data and so on, so for me it's the most convenient approach to run immich server on there too.

And for the backup side of things. I've tried manual backups with various stuff over the years. It's just not going to work for me. I either forget or life gets in the way or something other happens and then I'm several days or weeks behind the 'schedule'. With dedicated server I don't have to do anything, everything is running automatically at the background while I'm sleeping or doing something else more interesting than copying over a bunch of files.

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I think collaboration is another thing that's missing in your answer. Of course synchronization would be one main thing for me to use a photo gallery or note taking app across devices, since I'm often accessing stuff from my phone and my laptop. But I also like to share photos with my relatives and friends, I have shared calendars with my wife to organize our lives. I collaborate on projects and collaborative edit text documents. And sometimes I keep notes and small snippets on technical details mainly for myself, but also share that with the internet, for other people to learn how to install some software or customize it to a niche use-case. And while some of that could be done by separate applications as well, I often use one generic self-hosted platform and have that do everything, disregarding if some of the job doesn't really need the features.

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I have 113k images going back two decades. The screenshot above doesn't include RAW files, with those included I'm around 2 terabytes of total storage.

Immich is in fact a photo album, and a damn good one at that.
Immich keeps google's grubby paws off my photos. I don't need or want google datamining every precious memory I have in order to modify my behavior to their benefit.
Immich keeps my photos stored on my hardware, where I control access.
Immich shares photos between my wife and my phones.
Immich ensures that if I lose my phone, my photos aren't lost.
Immich lets me easily re edit and re-export RAW files without creating duplicates or losing metadata
Immich lets me conveniently share photos with friends and family without requiring them to have an account anywhere.

Mostly I self-host things when I want data synchronized between multiple devices, or I don't want to lose it in the event I lose the device it was created on.

Also, like, phone screens are tiny and typing on them is terrible? Why would you want to do everything on your phone?

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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.

How would you backup Immich on device?

And if you backup to Nextcloud than you already have a served?

So you are arguing that having a file server is enough?
And processing is done on client side?

That would be in this case very inefficient.

You would need to have all the data on the Client or transfer all the data to the client once you load it.
You device has to do all the processing which would lead to lower battery life.
How do you handle multiple Users? Giving partially access to the Filesystem?

I could come up with other points but this should give you an idea. Yes, for some use cases a server-client approach does not make sense but for a dedicated photo backup and indexer it absolutely does.

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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

And you don't share your photos with family, friends, or the public? Or is your sharing solution to spam people with MMS text messages?

Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point

No, I don't. If Immich provides a feature your phone doesn't, then it's not a good example of something that doesn't need to be self-hosted.

But let's talk about this.

I change phones every few years (as infrequently as I can, but until Framework starts making cell phones my options are limited). I've had cell phones break. I haven't yet lost one, but I can imagine it happening. Keeping all of my eggs in one easily broken, easily lost device over which I have increasingly less control sounds really stupid. But we can back the phone data, and that doesn't require self-hosting, as you say.

So when does self-hosting make sense? For me, it comes down two cases: (1) data sharing, and (2) multi-device use. The first one accounts for maybe 80% of my self-hosting. I really hate cell phones as computing devices. I hate typing on them, their absurdly small screens, and limited app selections. So my other case for self-hosting is so I can do most of my work on a desktop or laptop, yet still have access on a phone when I need to. Oftentimes, there's no mobile app for the data I want to access, or there is but app developers are using some stupid bespoke data format that nobody rose uses; so be self-hosting, I can get at and interact with that information from not only my mobile device, but from any device. I can borrow my wife's laptop if I didn't being mine; I can borrow my BIL's desktop when we're visiting them. I'm not forced to use a tiny screen and crappy hunt-and-peck on screen keyboard on my phone.

I'm interested in other examples you have; it sounds as if many self-host solutions perplex you, beyond Immich - what are they? I'm honestly curious. We know Immich adds value (for some people) through AI tagging, and that alone justifies self-hosting Immich for those people. What other software do you think it's silly to self-host?

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Oh man. Of all the self-hosted projects to not grasp, you picked the darling.

The creator of Immich had the same use case that got me in to self hosting:

A new family with child.
A whole lot of photos and video to share between the spouse and with extended family.
Ballooning Google (One) photos costs, to which I asked: am I going to pay this forever? Storage also caps out at 2 tb, which we are using more than.
A growing discontent with the idea of every family moment being harvested by a tech company I do not like.

At the core - Immich allows me a continuity of service and saves money while keeping spousal approval at the required levels.

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Have you considered Fairphone 5? Might not compare to modern phones but it's very repairable.

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I agree with this comment, it has very good points.

You device has to do all the processing which would lead to lower battery life.

The way iOS does it is it will only process it when your phone is plugged in and idle (e.g. when you're asleep at night).

[email protected]

And you don’t share your photos with family, friends, or the public? Or is your sharing solution to spam people with MMS text messages?

If I need to quickly show somebody a photo, I'll physically show them by pulling it up on my phone. If I need to send photos to someone, I'll send them using a preferred messenger such as Signal. It allows you to send up to 32 images in a single message. If I need to send images to multiple people, I can send it in a group text or select multiple people to send them to at the same time.

No, I don’t. If Immich provides a feature your phone doesn’t, then it’s not a good example of something that doesn’t need to be self-hosted.

The point is that everything Immich offers is something that could be run entirely on-device. While AI image tagging isn't currently available for alternatives, I'm upset that Immich requires a server instead of making it optional and letting you do image tagging on-device.

I’m interested in other examples you have; it sounds as if many self-host solutions perplex you, beyond Immich - what are they?

What I missed in my initial post was availability across devices. So, something like Vaultwarden would have been useless by my criteria. I have two independent KeePass databases. One exclusively for desktop accounts and one exclusively for mobile accounts. I want to compartmentalize those, so I have no reason to selfhost Vaultwarden. As I've learned, Vaultwarden and other software is useful because of availability across devices.

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Ooh I found the only other person who still prefers a mouse and keyboard it seems, going by the current trends and how much I hate them anyway

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Ok.

I agree about KeePass. Self-hosted password store satisfies neither of my constraints. I'm (1) not sharing my credentials with anyone, and (2) SyncThing satisfies replication across devices. On top of both of those, in this particular case not self-hosting a server is added security, as my key store is never exposed on a public server. It helps that both KeePassXC & Keepass2Android's DB merging and conflict resolution is outstanding.

I have, however, been contemplating getting myself a YubiKey, b/c my life gets a little harder of I lose my phone while traveling. I'd have to go through several steps to get into my home LAN to get passwords out of my kdbx, one of which involves a VPN secret key I don't have memorized.

Anyway, yeah, I agree about that one. Publicly hosted password stores are not only unnecessary but - IMHO - kind of a stupid idea. Talk about maximizing your attack surface.

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I did look at that one! Specifically for the non-Android OS support. I'm really interested in trying SailfishOS, but if one of the Linux-based mobile OSes works reasonably well (my issue in the past has always been terrible battery life), I'd be thrilled.

Do you have one? Of so, which OS are you running? How do you like it?

agnos.is Forums

I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting