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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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.
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 Especially bookmarks, how many of them is out of date, or not relevant to you any more.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. 😀
Karakeep. It will throw an error if a website is down and you won’t get tags.
I think that’s a feature 😅😅
Just kidding, I had no issue with my photos for example with Photoprism, but for streaming my music with gonic I need to make some modifications for all my album art to show up, and in some cases titles and album names…
It is indeed a great feature but how time-consuming haha :)
I inherited my music collection from my 20 years old limewire addicted self, so it’s a complete mess. I’m in the process of completing albums and using Picard to properly tag everything… 20 years of music collection…it’ll take me 20 more years!
Anyway, I guess it’s a warning for anyone starting to accumulate data: think about metadata, formats and data-management. NOW!
I think life is easier if you stop managing metadata and instead deal in folder structure. My music has never had consistent metadata and tagging, yet it’s never been a problem. I use Gonic and just browse my music by folder structure.
These days I try to do both, but recognize it’s an on-going thing that will never be done.
Sometimes folder structure can be a challenge because of extensive metadata. Where do parts of a compilation go, for example. At least with metadata, music players can show the tracks correctly.
Same boat. I put everything in Picard and let it analyze everything. It turned out about 95% perfect. Haven’t touched it since, and I’m using the metadata it generated.
I went through the exact same situation with my 20 year old music collection and MusicBrainz Picard and unfortunately this is just the state of music piracy even now as things are rarely tagged correctly or come from compilation albums, sample albums, or are just obscure and don’t have the proper tags available on the service. This is why I don’t mind paying for music streaming even though I selfhost most other media formats because you can put in days of work tagging songs and still have a jumbled mess at the end (Picard’s tagging template is also a huge PITA to use with some obscure legacy language).
I had some issues with my old kazaa era mp3s and figured it was sometimes easier to just download them again using soulseek…Now I have better formats and quality along with tagged files. Then I use navidrome to serve my music
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.
There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.
I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.
On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.
That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.
You understand the value of risk management.
I do both - older vehicles always needing attention, and self-hosting shit
Make sure you check https://karakeep.app/, because it has, at least, automatic tagging and full text search on the bookmarks
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.
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).
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).
It’s important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you’re getting more out than you’re putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won’t have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.
Thanks for mentioning SingleFile. I’m not using it right now.
The workflow with linkding and the linkding injector is gold.
Hate? Digital decluttering feels really good, for me anyway.
Pain feels good. It’s like sport, is it? Is it sport? I’m healthy.
If you really access them that infrequently, are they actually worth keeping?
Plus if they’re links, how many still work?
Actualy a lot more than I thought, and they bring joy, as souvenirs :)
There’s also the slightly-less-hidden cost.
Electricity to run your home server(s).
Are you kidding me? True, there is time involved. My biggest ‘sin’ right now is “home gallery” for it works on MY directory structure which I won’t give up.
The geoguessing game that hides in it is superb ! I’m still amazed with the images I’ve been able to locate. Sometimes 40 years back.
