Updated: 1 Aug 2025
| thing | service | replaces | phone? | ereader? | rating | thoughts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Movies, TV | Plex | Netflix, all the various streaming services | ✅ | n/a | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | |
| Ebooks | Calibre-Web-Automated | Amazon | ✅ | ✅ | ⭐⭐⭐ | |
| Audiobooks | Audiobookshelf | Amazon | ✅ | n/a | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | |
| News/blogs/social media | FreshRSS | Twitter, Facebook, NYT | ✅ | haven’t tried yet, but theoretically yes? | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Moving everything to RSS |
| Bookmarks/read it later | Wallabag | ✅ | ✅ | ⭐⭐⭐ | Reading things later with Wallabag and my Kobo | |
| Syncing | Syncthing | Dropbox, Google Drive | ✅ | ❌ | ⭐⭐⭐ | |
| Notes | Obsidian | Evernote | ✅ | n/a | ⭐⭐⭐ | On being an Obsidian power user |
| Document digitization | Paperless-ngx | Dropbox | ✅ | n/a | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | |
| Photos | Immich | Google Photos | ✅ | n/a | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Imprisoning your users - an experience with Google Takeout |
Those are all the services I have so far, and they are making my poor little Synology NAS choke and wheeze. Sorry, buddy. Yet while my Synology suffers, I am filled with joy!
I still have a few pieces I’d like to put together, to really bring this “self-hosted Internet” thing home (nyuk nyuk nyuk):
Cooking? NYT Cooking is still my go-to for excellent recipes (and comment banter), and Eat Your Books is awesome for indexing my existing, physical cookbooks. I’ve seen some self-hostable FOSS options like Mealie, Tandoor, maybe kinda Grocy? None of them are really inspiring me yet - and Tandoor made my Synology really struggle - but we’ll see.
Passwords? I’m comforted by the idea of locally hosting my password manager - it did always feel a bit weird to have my One Password to Rule Them All chilling in the cloud somewhere (encrypted or not idk).
Git? Another sort of interesting one. I hadn’t considered self-hosting a GitHub replacement. As Working in Public discussed, a lot of the open source ecosystem is platformed by GitHub - and kind of incentivized/promoted/facilitated by GitHub and its “social media”-esque features. I do have some private git repos - e.g. my family holiday card - that I use GitHub to version control and… well, I don’t like doing that. I would prefer something more private for those.
LLMs! This is the big one. I use Claude so much these days and would LOVE a truly private, local, self-hosted LLM option. It’s only a matter of time before Claude/ChatGPT/etc start promoting products, and I want to get out and have my own local solution before then. I’ve played around with Open Web UI and Ollama - just on my wheezing, middle-aged Lemur Pro and just as a proof of concept. It worked! Huzzah. But there’s no way my Synology could handle the compute that even a small model would need. So I’m daydreaming about upgrading my hardware to a GPU and really getting things going… Update, Aug 2025: I’m now halfway there with a local pass-through of cloud LLM providers.
Video calls? FOSS Academic had a cool post about using only, well, FOSS tools - including Nextcloud for video conferencing. I also want to support digital sovereingty/European tech for political reasons - and Nextcloud is French? German? Frerman. I also kinda wonder if I can get my non-tech fam onto Nextcloud? I’ve discovered one of them is paying for Dropbox again. 😬
Minecraft? My kids are actually still too small for Minecraft, but, well, it’s an option. Any other games? I would love to self-host some of my nostalgia games of yore like Earthworm Jim or The Sims.
I also have been thinking about switching out some of these services - e.g. Karakeep for Wallabag? Jellyfin for Plex? 🤷 For now, I’m (very) happy.
Some “economics of open source” thoughts#
Working in Public was a starter book on economics in open source - but it really just scratched the surface, tbh. I was trained as an economist - it was my first love! 💙 - and I get easily nerd sniped by odd socio-economic arrangements. And open source is odd! It is weird and wonderful! The idea that people bring their technical skills to voluntarily work on hobby projects collaboratively… For no reason except passion???… And that those projects end up, uh, supporting the entire Internet infrastructure (I’m thinking of Linux and git and Python and pandas…). Last I checked, the market cap for “tech” is ~20 trillion USD. And - again - the absolute core foundation is… based on free labor? Driven by passion?
What’s even more exciting (and anarchic…) about open source is that it can only be successful if it’s collaborative. One of the big themes of PyCon this year (beyond politics!) was actually maintainer burnout - see Lynn Root’s keynote about this. Burnout permeated tons of discussions and talks. And, indeed, Working in Public highlighted how many (many many…) open source projects often rely on a single (!) maintainer - doing frankly thankless grunt work to keep it going.
I remember running into that when I made a PR, long ago (maybe for Hacktober?), on some Python timezone stuff. It may have been pytz. Something that was used… everywhere?? I think I was fixing something in black? Or pandas? Anyway, it was like a foundational library - the management of TIME - and it’s basically one guy who’s been maintaining it since forever.
ALL THAT TO SAY… these days, I think a lot about digital sovereignty and self-hosting and “well, we don’t have a lord” and community building and human cooperation as the key to our survival. And I’m like, shit, I need to probably actively maintain these services I’ve just installed from Docker Hub? Like, Audiobookshelf is fantastic - but is it gonna be around in 1 year? 5 years? Do I need to help it? Will I eventually need to fork it and run my own? Should I fork it now and start specializing it to my very specific, tiny community’s needs? For now I am WAY too busy with paid tech job work and unpaid “women’s work” (aka, the house and kids, aka maybe a big reason women’s contributions to FOSS are very rare indeed).
Edited to add: Oh, funny, a very relevant article on these issues just popped up in Shareable.