This question has been answered. Please stop trying to repeat information that has already been said many times before. Everything in this thread is in good faith, I am here to learn, so I will make mistakes. Furthermore, if you want to contribute something new, please read the entire post to avoid misunderstanding the purpose of this post.
Selfhosting is useful when you either need a lot of storage or a lot of processing power. For example, Kiwix is useful to selfhost on a server because a lot of its content can take up terabytes of storage, which a phone may not have. LLMs are also useful to selfhost because they require a degree of processing power that, again, a phone may not have.
In both cases, there is also a need for perpetual access. If you simply hosted an LLM on your home computer, it wouldn’t be very useful to access from your phone since your computer won’t be running all the time. So, a separate always-on server is needed.
However, there are some selfhosted software that I don’t see a use for. 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. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers. Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point. AI image tagging is also something that could be run on-device as well, since it’s mostly lightweight (iPhones are capable of it). Having a setup like that also comes with the benefit of automatic backups being completely optional, rather than required.
There’s no reasonable need for extra storage or extra processing power needed for that use case, from what I can tell. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually used Immich before, so this is speculation. I apologize if I’m missing something obvious) There’s a lot of other selfhosted tools like spotDL which have a selfhosted web UI, but no GUI that can be installed outside of a web browser.
I guess my question is why there are so many selfhosted tools that unnecessarily require being run on a separate device. I do understand the legitimate use cases some of them have, but others seem better off on-device airgapped. This especially became an issue trying to find a notes app for Android that requires no account and runs fully locally, or an RSS reader that loads from the device itself. I found Joplin and Feeder or Read You as the software for each of those. I don’t like “server-based” selfhosting for things that could be done from the device itself.
I’m sorry if this turned into a rant. If someone could help me understand, I would appreciate that very much.
Cheers!
Edit: The comparison here isn’t between selfhosting and using a cloud provider. The comparison here is between selfhosting on a server and running explicitly on-device (besides where extra storage or processing power is required)
Answer
So that nobody has to dig through the comments for answers, this is what I’ve learned: In the case of Immich, its purpose isn’t designed to be a photo gallery. It’s designed to be a more polished backup solution, designed explicitly for photos and not general files. While Nextcloud could be used to backup photos, it’s not as focused on photos as Immich, and so it isn’t as nice to use for that purpose. Immich also allows you to share photos with a link, rather than relying on a cloud provider to do that for you. There’s also another benefit to selfhosting that I hadn’t entirely realized, which is availability across devices. Some things like an eBook library may not take up much space, but it’s convenient to not have to sync manually (or automatically) across devices, and instead access it from a central server. That same logic is true for RSS readers as well, since it’s inconvenient to manually add and sync feeds across devices. Syncing across devices can be done with something like Syncthing in some cases, but not all, and so that’s where selfhosting can be useful.
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OP says the question has been answered. Locking the discussion so they don’t have to suffer through any more repeat information.
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.
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 anyone datamining every precious memory I have in order to modify my behavior to their benefit.
- 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?
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
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.
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.
They’re meant to be run on a local server ie whatever other computer you have that runs 24/7
Tldr - selfhosting is useful when:
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you need a lot of storage
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you need a lot of processing
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you are collaborating with multiple people/family members
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you are sharing media with other people outside your network
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you are sharing media across devices
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you want a standalone backup independent of your mobile device without doing so manually
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you want more advanced AI features that are not feasible to do on device (such as image detection or live security camera object detection)
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you want your home IOT devices to work locally without a cloud connection
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you have old hardware collecting dust and want to put it to use
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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
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In immich I can open the world map and select photos i took in Hungary and Colorado without having to manually tag and manually locate them, and I have thousands of photos (hundreds of gigs of videos backed up from my phone as well) from the last 25 years taken across the world and can do this seamlessly by simply uploading them and having my server run a heuristic to automatically do this from the photograph metadata, and then proceed to share them with a self-hosted link to my spouse to enjoy.
Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?
Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?
I suppose not. That’s a fair point. Although I will mention, if your camera supports it, location metadata can be embedded automatically. Aves and many other gallery apps support viewing photos with location data on the map.
I don’t use gallery apps on my phone because I don’t have the space for terabytes of photos and videos on my phone, but my server sitting in my closet does.
So Aves and other gallery apps are useless to me, and I’ll stick with whatever native gallery app exists ob whatever phone i use.
I can remotely view my entire gallery from abroad with Immich (which also happens to allow me to sync photos), and save the space on my phone for more photos.
It does everything Google charges money for in Google photos, but for free. NextCloud and random gallery apps offers nothing similar.
@Charger8232@lemmy.ml I run my own server for a simple reason: it means owning my social media presence.
I own my content, my audience, and who I federate with.
Thanks, I now also understand the purpose of Immich because of this post.
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?
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.
Have you considered Fairphone 5? Might not compare to modern phones but it’s very repairable.
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?
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. One bug is I can’t charge it in power save mode.
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.
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.
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.
Appreciate this post OP, as I’ve wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it’s not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).
In your example Immich is an alternative to Nextcloud that is more specialized. If you already run a Nextcloud there is no real need to run Immich indeed. But in reverse you might not need all the features Nextcloud provides and Immich would be a more streamlined alternative for sharing and storing images.
If every app had their own selfhosted backup solution, it wouldn’t be very convenient. I’d think it better to run Nextcloud to back everything up than to deal with setting each backup solution up individually. Is there a major benefit to Immich that I’m missing?
If all you need is a photo backup solution (and for many people that is true) then Immich is a far more polished and less janky option. Nextcloud is a typical “jack of all trades, master of none” type of software.
That’s a good point, and I agree. I still wish Immich could function as an on-device photo app, with selfhosted backups being optional.
On device isn’t always ideal. I don’t use immich because i don’t have a large photo library. But I do use komga. Nextcloud can sort and manage epub/pdf like komga but as poVoq said, the specialized solution is superior
This point is where on device app is not the ideal situation, for me at least. These apps exist. Tachiyomi and the resultant forks can import a local library. And frankly even a somewhat massive local library can fit on a cheap SD card
The point of the server is portability. With this I have portability across my devices. My library, reading status, metadata, etc is available on all devices. I can read a book on my ereader, close it, the status is synced. I can pick up from my laptop and the same thing occurs. I can pick up from my phone, download the book to my device, and keep reading while I’m away from home. If I wanted to I could open remote access to my server and avoid the need for downloading the books but that’s a whole thing
I don’t think it would make sense to run a server solely for this but it’s a service that doesn’t take much in terms of resources and I read a lot.
I run both … nextcloud is very inconvenient for finding stuff and slow in loading. I still use nextcloud to sync, but immich for tagging and displaying, because it’s much faster and better in UI etc.
I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.
Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.
I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.
Would something like Syncthing work for this instead?
I personally use Syncthing for backing up gamesaves to my home server and it works great. While it would technically work for this application, it would be significantly more work to set up and maintain for photo management than just kicking up an Immich Docker container. Go check out their docs if you haven’t already, it’s pretty sweet how easy it is to manage stuff with Immich
To me, the appeal is that my workflow depends less on my computer and more on my ability to connect to a server that handles everything for me. Workstation, laptop or phone? Doesn’t matter, just connect to the right IPs and get working. Linux is, of course, the holy grail of interoperability, and I’m all Linux. With a little bit of set up, I can make a lot of things talk to each other seamlessly. SMB on Windows is a nightmare but on Linux if I set up SSH keys then I can just open a file manager and type sftp://<hostname> and now I’m browsing that machine as if it was a local folder. I can do a lot of work from my genuinely-trash laptop because it’s the server that’s doing the heavy lifting
TL;DR -
My workflow becomes “client agnostic” and I value that a lot
Thanks reasonable! That does make me realize how different my workflow is. My philosophy is compartmentalizing everything. What I do on my phone stays on my phone. What I do on my desktop stays on my desktop. What I do on my laptop stays on my laptop. I’ve never really had the need for anything more until now. Then again, I’ve also never had the resources to selfhost until now.
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.
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.
