I don't understand the purpose of some selfhosting

[uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca]

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:

1. A new family with child.
2. A whole lot of photos and video to share between the spouse and with extended family.
3. 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.
4. 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.

[tabular@lemmy.world]

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

[charger8232@lemmy.ml]

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).

[charger8232@lemmy.ml]

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.

[boonhet@lemm.ee]

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

[sxan@midwest.social]

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.

[sxan@midwest.social]

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?

[grue@lemmy.world]

Thanks, I now also understand the purpose of Immich because of this post.

[owljfien@lemm.ee]

I've been meaning to look into Immich for the express purpose of dropping nextcloud.
I actually hate nextcloud because its a bloated mess that does many things ok instead of one thing well.
I just want to auto backup photos and files from my phone, but the android app sucks and locks within a microsecond of trying to do any kind of multitasking on phone.

[cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml]

I run CalyxOS on FP4, and I like it. It also has FP5 support. As far as I know, mobile Linux distros like postmarketOS work on (at least) FP4, but key phone functionality is lacking. There's a functionality matrix on their wiki.

[mystik@lemmy.world]

I also use syncthing. And it works pretty well. There is some turmoil with the android version in light of changes so the underlying sdk. And I am not sure there is an iOS syncthing that would work as well. I actually use it primarily to sync my keepass databases, and before Immich, my photos.

The photo management Immich brings makes it a nice alternative for that use case, but either way I need to have one or more servers elsewhere managing storage so I can get things off of my phone into a system I can control.

[tabular@lemmy.world]

I came from a ~10 year old phone so FF5 was a big upgrade. Battery lasts the work day (may go from 80% to ~50% or ~30% mostly playing bluetooth audio for like 4 hours on and off). Fairphone uses some industrial chip instead of a mobile one - so it uses more power but they say it can get much longer updates than other phones. I usually have the screen set to 60Hz to save power, but a cheeky 120Hz session feels great.

I got standard Android but replaced the proprietary store/apps (updates still requires Google Pain Store). I planned to try out an Android fork later but that's was not as easy as I had naively thought. [Requires an SDK binary that come with non-free license and 3rd party guides to build it myself were rather dead].

I not aware it could run non-android OS - do you have exp installing a Linux phone OS? How did you find that? I'll have to look into FF5 compatibility.

[sxan@midwest.social]

Thanks for the info!

I just went looking to see what it ran and found this forum, which has a pretty comprehensive list.

I didn't have much trouble getting Touch on a really old Pixel, but the battery runs down in 3 or 4 hours so I didn't do anything with it. That's probably more to do with the age of the phone than the OS.

[sxan@midwest.social]

That's what's been stopping me; it has to at least be a decent phone, and it sends as if there's always something.

Touch is supposed to run on the FP5 - I guess I need to find a functionality Matrix now.

[archomrade@midwest.social]

Tldr - selfhosting is useful when:

• you need a lot of storage

• you need a lot of processing

• you are collaborating with multiple people/family members

• you are sharing media with other people outside your network

• you are sharing media across devices

• you want a standalone backup independent of your mobile device without doing so manually

• you want more advanced AI features that are not feasible to do on device (such as image detection or live security camera object detection)

• you want your home IOT devices to work locally without a cloud connection

• you have old hardware collecting dust and want to put it to use

• you like to make things

Seems like you might have understood the purpose of those apps, you just didn't personally have those needs yourself, and that's fine

[hybridsarcasm@lemmy.world]

OP says the question has been answered. Locking the discussion so they don’t have to suffer through any more repeat information.