Self-hosting services has been a life-changer. And I thank this community for helping me a lot recently. Not only did I learn a lot more about linux, network and docker, but it helped me understand better how platforms and advertising just f*cked up the internet I grew up with.
But I wonder: do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!
I’m in the process of migrating my web browser bookmarks to linkding because it’s a GREAT tool. But I have like 2k websites to manualy check wether they’re still there, wonder at how cool they still are, tag properly and archive with SingleFile!
And that’s just ONE service…
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I thought the hidden cost is my power bill by having a PC run 24/7…
You should see if you can get all of your services to work on a Raspberry Pi. They hardly use any power.
Some things would, but not everything, so at best case, I would need to run 2 computers instead of one. I have a beefy spare M1 MacBook Pro, uses almost the same as the Raspberry but it’s horrible for selfhosting.
I condensed down from a power hungry tower server to a couple of thinkstations and a nas. Much nicer on the power.
Have you considered the possibility that, if you have 2k bookmarks, this isn’t necessarily a self-hosting issue, but rather a bookmark hoarding issue :)
That’s why I don’t go back and reorganize old bookmarks. I just start fresh every time.
I don’t think I’ve even used bookmarks since Vista.
This is what I do. I keep the old ones around for a while, and every time I realize that I’m not missing anything, and delete them.
Worst case, I’ll have to root around in my backups. But it has never happened wrt browser bookmarks.
I know, right!? Do I have to let go? Yes! Am I defined as a person by the shit I accumulate? No!
Sometimes hitting delete is the best thing you can do. Especially bookmarks, how many of them is out of date, or not relevant to you any more. And if you needed some of it, you can find it again. Sure, there is a few things a bit harder to find, but it should take less time than sort through 2k bookmarks. 😀
There’s also the slightly-less-hidden cost.
Electricity to run your home server(s).
I hate having to run my own backups. That’s been a massively hidden cost behind self hosting that I did not originally account for. Anything sufficiently robust is expensive and anything cheap is unreliable (at least at the scales of data I have, 4k+ RAW videos and photos are massive).
Does it still count as “self hosting” if one of your backups uses something like restic to push to b2 or hetzner storage boxes? It’s not consumer point and click.
I have one copy going there, and one going to a $50 thinkstation usff connected to a single external hard drive. It’s not raid, but if it dies, it just gets quickly replaced while I rely on the hosted backup.
IMO that’s not a hidden cost. That’s a decision you made. The actual hidden cost is the electricity and time you spend by configuring and mantaining your services.
Just 2k in bookmarks? Pffft! Those are rookie numbers. Check back when you have 59k bookmarks. Currently there are 1.1k in the broken links category. The vast majority of the links are topics I research or have interest in, exterior of self-hosting. I do not consume TV data, but I do a ton of reading. I find that reading gives me better retention of the topic, and it’s rather easy to highlight & search for cross comparisons, and further research. Ever since I was a wee lad, barely able to read, I have had an insatiable lust for knowing. It is this that drives the link counts. LOL
Manual web crawler at that point
LOL Never thought of it like that, but yeah.
When I need something I’ll ask you instead of google
LOL
That’s the neat part…
This is so foreign to me. I never bookmark anything ever. I leave a few tabs open until I complete that task, read that article or decide I don’t care anymore.
I found that going back to bookmarking (and subscribing to RSS) is the best way to pull away from the algorithm-feed-trough of the social media websites and SEO bullshit. As I got more and more bookmarks of interesting sites, and found lots of feeds to subscribe too, I found I naturally gravitated away from the corporate web. It’s a requirement now if you are interested at all in indie-web type stuff, forums for esoteric hobbies or software communities, or personal web pages of interesting people -those things just don’t show up on search engines or social media anymore.
Lemmy does a good enough job of bringing content to me. But I appreciate your perspective. It’s definitely something to keep in mind as we get closer to the AI apocalypse.
I digitally collect odd things, selfhosted in several apps depending on if it’s for ‘read later and decide’ or preserve… For one, I like the etymology of words or phrases and how they’ve evolved in meaning, and in some instances bastardized the meaning. For another, I collect political cartoons from any country. I am fascinated how some of the ones I’ve read about, have changed some people’s minds. Things I find educational. Things that are totally polar opposite me. You’d be surprised what you learn even tho you may still remain opposed. So these are a back up of a backup which gets backed up, lol, It’s the source files if you will, and I archive them in another app however I still keep the source as a backstop.
I’ll end with this as an example since this might be misconstrued as not about selfhosting, As a wee lad, someone donated a set of Encyclopedia Britannica to us. I read those cover to cover many times. So, with the help of self hosting and dedicated devs around the globe, thank you so very much for being so generous with your skills and time, I can continue my quest to know.
TL:DR: I’m just a weird, old man.
I’m the same! I just don’t keep track of where all the useless knowledge in my head comes from.
When you’re 70, you need all the help in the remembering dept you can get.
I guess the trick is to not look for stuff to host because you’ll end up with all kinds of things you weren’t doing in the first place.
And so little time!
do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!
What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.
As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.
It looks like we found another person that’s immune! Sample their blood
Actually, that is a thing I like. Going through this stuff can be tedious, but it brings a lots of memories, things that I forgot about, things I once wanted to do. And also, after cleaning my digital life I feel similar as after cleaning in the physical world - good - I did something, I made my world a tad bit more organized and a tad less overwhelming. (I should note that I am lazy and I always must force myself to clean, but I never regret doing that after I start 😀) P.S. as I wrote in one comment below, maybe bookmarks is not a necessarily a thing that you want to go through and sort. Here I am more writing about my notes, or photos, etc…
Definitely second your feeling. I am similar in my relationship to cleaning. It feels like a lot of effort, but efforts feel good afterwards.
Karakeep. It will throw an error if a website is down and you won’t get tags.
Content management makes up very little of what I self host.
That stuff’s just curated and is always been curated as I take new things that I need I curate them.
Then there’s another class of data I deal with which is synchronization. Synchronization as the wheat and the chaff in it and if any of it goes away I don’t really care because anything that was really worth keeping already got curated.
Nothing better than a properly formatted data file.
Self hosting teaches you this2000 Websites? WTF why?
I just moved 20k bookmarks from Pocket to Readeck, and can sympathize lol. A lot of the links are dead. I found a cleanup script I’m going to run but it’s still a huge curation challenge
Simplify as much as you can.
And remember, if you’re also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you’re gone.
I’ve been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.
This. I’m not that old yet, but the realization hit me in the face pretty hard. And all the more reasons to sort it out. And definitely simplify. Or “make it usable” let’s say.
You don’t even have to be old. Death or serious illness/injury can affect us at any age, and it would suck if your family lost access to all the self-hosted photos and videos, for example.
“Make it usable” is a great idea.
Scaryyyy !
I just very recently discovered that bitwarden (vaultwarden) has this perfect feature like a “trusted contact” (not sure) where you can choose a person that can request access to your password vault, and if you DON’T answer in X days (configurable), they get access.
And you can put a secure note in there that has all the instructions necessary for them to access anything they might need (either by taking that note to someone skilled enough to follow the instructions, or by making it dead simple enough for them to just extract everything to an empty external ntfs hard drive in a simple file hierarchy).
