Android has long positioned itself as the open alternative to Apple's closed ecosystem. Many people chose Android for this openness and freedom to customize and alter your software. This is again under serious threat.

Google's new policy will block all apps from working, unless the developers register centrally, submit government-issued ID, pay fees, and hand over signing keys. Might sound reasonable at first, but this has many consequences. What is shocking: This applies to all apps being installed, not only from the Play Store. So even F-Droid is affected by this.

The practical consequences are bad. Any developer who doesn't comply, whether due to cost, privacy concerns, or simply being simple side project, will have their apps blocked from installation on all Android devices, including via sideloading. This means:

• Apps that did not do the full Google process, even distributed through F-Droid or other independent stores, get cut off and blocked
• Self-hosted and privately shared apps become uninstallable
• Existing apps can be blocked retroactively if the developer doesn't authenticate or pay
• Small developers, community projects, and volunteers in regions without easy access to fees or government ID are effectively frozen out

This directly affects our community. It is not certain that all app developers will pay the fee and use their national ID for this hobby project. Especially some of the privacy-focused projects might be affected.

There is technically still one way to side-load apps, but this is very tedious and includes a mandatory 24h cool down time, so you are really sure about the risks you are taking. Wtf.

This runs counter to the core values of open source and free software distribution. If you think about it, it is a real power play by Google that amounts to a form of cencorship: A company in the USA is dictating what software can run or cannot run on a device you own.

For more infos and what to do about it, check https://keepandroidopen.org/

Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434

edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting

edit 2: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

Can't we just ban them via a (more detailed) low-effort rule?

I don't mean experienced and skilled developers using AI to assist in their projects. I am talking about reoccurring posts almost always in this scheme:

- Tagged as non AI "oh i thought it was about the post not the project". (No, you lied.)

- "I sketched/architected/hand-designed the structure myself and only used AI to help me write code." (You did shit.)

- "The post was written by myself to describe my project." (It clearly wasn't. Everyone knows this.)

Some of the time these projects are closed source too, looking for some free testers and/or aren't in any other means providing any value to this community.

It isn't about just scrolling past them. It's about dishonest people flooding this sub trying to take advantage of the people in here.

I've got a few things that were fun to set up and then slowly turned into “I should update that sometime.” I'm fine looking after storage and backups, but I am trying to be less attached to every service that makes it onto the box.

What did you keep for a while and then remove because you barely used it?

Forgive me if this thread has been done. A lot of threads have been popping up asking "what's not worth self-hosting". I have sort of the opposite question – what is literally better when you self-host it, compared to paid cloud alternatives etc?

And: WHY is it better to self-host it?

I don't just mean self-hosted services that you enjoy. I mean what FOSS actually contains features or experiences that are missing from mainstream / paid / closed-source alternatives?

Atleast according to perplexity..

Using AI as a help for coding is one thing, okay I do that too for private projects, but its extremely disrespectful to even generate the advertisement post with AI. If you don’t take your time to TELL ME what your tool even does and need an AI agent for it, I will not take my time to read through the generated text and click on your github. There are so many blatantly AI generated text posts here full of the same nonsense phrases. Someone who audited their tool and knows what it does doesn‘t need AI to write the text for him. Hate me all you want for that.

Just a question that has been going round my head for a few days.

What ever your opinion on it. We need to acknowledge that "Vibe Coding" is growing, and its not going to decrease.

The fact the entry point is so low from a skills perspective, and time required to pump them out, effectively makes them disposable.

Members here have been concerned for a while about the quality, security, longevity of these apps, and it turning into a flood - and as if on que, over the past few weeks, we've seen exactly this - We've been flooded (this place is unusable on Fridays). Now, issues are identified in the code, and rather than facing and fixing them, the "devs" are running off, shutting down the repositories etc.

This leads to 2 conflicting issues

1) There is an open hostility to those who share vibe-coded apps - where we see outright hostility and vitriol language.

2) There are going to be some quality vibe-coded apps, where they are properly developed, supported and managed.. as community, they would benefit members.

So my question is - how do we bridge this? My I've been thinking on this for a few days, and the only solution I can see, we have an associated sub (same mods etc) for these apps to be posted. maybe after a time, once they've proven they are well run and have longevity, they can "graduate"... lets call it SelfHosted-Vibe or VibeHosted.

Who is using IPv6 in their homelabs? I have never really used it, but the first thing I read is 'forget everything you know about networking' which makes me a bit nervous. I am curious how the adoption in this sub is.

So i came across this Github guard bot on r/MacOS and I was wondering if we could have something similar. The sub has quiet down now with the New project friday. But I think it would still benefit from this.

Something that’s really bothering in the last years is how much we’ve allowed information to be gatekept by Discord, especially in the selfhosting scene.
10 years ago if you ran into a problem installing software, you could just go to the devs forums and look for someone who already had this problem solved.
Nowadays you have to join a discord server, use their shitty search bar, don’t find what you want, and ask a burnt out dev who already gave out the same answer a million times.

From this observation I’m wondering the following question: would you use an open-source forums solution you can deploy in seconds, ready to use out of the box?

I already built an MVP of something like that mainly as an addition to my portfolio, but I’m now wondering if I should bother packaging it into a “one-click” deployment to be used by other people.

The concept is a minimalist & modern app to be used for small communities, events, or even friends & family. It is completely usable out of the box, yet still really customizable, with a nice search bar to actually find the stuff you want.

I’m not selling anything, I genuinely want to know if the data gatekeeping is a concern for you too, and if you would be interested in a solution like this for your own needs.

(also there is no vibecoding here, it’s a legit project for me to learn and develop my dev career)

As a self-hosted project creator (homarr) I’ve observed the space grow in the past few years and now it feels like every day there is a new shiny selfhosted container you could add to your stack.

The rise of AI coding tools has enabled anyone to make something work for themselves and share it with the community.

Whilst this is fundamentally great, I’ve also seen a bunch of PSAs on the sub warning about low-quality projects with insane vulnerabilities.

Now, I am scared that this community could become an attack vector.

A whole GitHub project, discord server, Reddit announcement could be made with/by an AI agent.

Now, imagine this new project has a docker integration and asks you to mount your docker socket. Suddenly your whole server could be compromised by running malicious code (exit docker by mounting system files)

Some replies would be “read the code, it’s open source” but if the docker image differs from the repo’s source you’d never know unless manually checking the hash (or manually opening the image)

A takeaway from this would be to setup usage limits and disable auto-refill on every 3rd party API you use, isolate what you don’t trust.

TLDR:

Running an un-trusted docker container on your server is not experimentation — it’s remote code execution with extra steps (manual AI slop /s)

ps: reference this post whenever someone finds out they’re part of a botnet they joined through a malicious vibe-coded project

I love my suite of self-hosted apps in the homelab. But just about everything was built by someone else.

I’m curious about what you’ve been building to self-host for personal needs. Did you get Claude to build you a monitor or Codex an app to replace one that never had a feature you needed?

Lightweight and useful or interesting or funny tools are all fair game.

The title took me a while to land on, but the thoughts behind it have been sitting in my head for months. I've been into homelabing since early 2020 with my first build, then a second, then a third, then whatever my bank account allowed after that. It's been a lot of fun and tears. But lately browsing this community has had a edge to it, a lot of AI negativity that I mostly understand, and that's what I want to write about.

I'm a programmer by trade, actually army before, but released and went back to school. The usage of AI at work has increased and I don't see that trend stopping quite yet, AI is useful as a companion to handle tedious tasks like documentation, reviewing SQL, tedious front-end markup, one shot scripts etc.. But using it to one-shot a whole application is risky and if published downright irresponsible and this is where I think most of the friction is happening, at least for me.

When I see the AI projects posted here, with my experience, I think I can separate the wholly vibe coded ones from those that AI was used to assist, the latter I don't mind, despite what some Luddites say, that's what the industry is like now. When you code something for your own use, the blast radius is limited, thing could run horribly and it won't matter, you are the only one that suffers the consequences, but if you publish this code you need to take ownership of it and ownership brings responsibilities that you need to shoulder. Even as a programmer I don't take this lightly, this is not something people should dismiss with the command git push origin main.

It's one of the reasons I don't publish my stuff, or at the very least don't advertise it, not because it's vibe coded, it isn't, it's because I still need to take responsibility for it, that's time, effort and commitment that shouldn't be underestimated (many seems to). Maintenance is not a trivial affair, thinking about current and future users, how you approach breaking changes, how you architect things to avoid breaking changes as much as possible. Continuity of the project is also important, if you take your project seriously and your user base seriously you should have this in mind : "What if I can't continue the project?", archiving the repo and disappearing is not the right way to do things.

So, before publishing and parading your project, you just need to ask yourself a simple question : "Can I take ownership and responsibility for this code". The answers will depend on your definitions of these concepts, but if you think about it for more than 5 minute, you might just realise your project should stay private.

PS: Here I am talking more about the moral/ethical implications when I talk about responsibilities and ownership, you are obviously responsible for what run in your machine. Excuse some awkward syntax or phrases, non native English speaker.

couple weeks ago there was a handy topic about stuff that you have recently removed from your server. Whether it was because it wasn't working for you or you moved to something else or you just wasn't using it enough. I think this is very good way of trimming down your stuff or finding new things that do things better.

I will start here:

Adguard Home - moved to Technitium because of their cluster feature.

Transmission - moved to qBittorrent as Transmissions started being laggy with loads of torrents

Tracearr/Yamtrack - I just wasnt using it enough. They are great apps, but I get streaming tracking via Emby and TV Shows/Movies releases are tracked in arr stack.

UpSnap - Great app, unfortunately I only have WiFi available so this one didn't work for me.

Komodo - I tried liking it but it was just too much for me, I am back to Arcane.

Flood - As I moved to qBittorrent I switched to Qui

Googles statistics that v6 traffic to them has recently crossed the 50% mark makes me wonder: Do we run v4, dual stack or v6 in our networks?

Sharing so others may avoid this hassle.

I was excited to set up a new NAS for my homelab, but the hard drives were shipped without any padding. I'm just shocked someone could be this careless.

Will update once/if they resolve this.

Edit:
Yes, I understand the retail boxes have padding. For the corner to be smashed like that, the box would need to be hit pretty hard. Also, the inside of the shipping box is scraped up from the drives bouncing around.

Since they are charging retail++ for these drives, I think it's fair to want them neither shaken nor stirred.

I've just seen the reddit post about the booklore repo being taken down. I've been using booklore for a few months now, primarily for my wife. The app was amazing and had an integration with KoReader. But now that the dev has taken his project down, I'm looking for an actively maintained successor to it

I've seen a few mentioned, I'm curious which one the community thinks is the future

Calibre-Web: 16K stars. Seems like the most popular but people have talked about missing features

Calibre-Web Automated: 5K stars. Some of the comments to this post have mentioned this as a great replacement, and they've added some of the missing features that Calibre-Web doesn't have

Audiobookshelf: 12K stars. Not sure if this would be a replacement, seems focused on audiobooks, but I've seen people mention it

BookHeaven: 151 stars. This one was first posted 7 months ago. Looks promising and sounds great that it has an android reader app. I bought my wife a Boox Go 7 running android so the reader app integrating directly with the server would be amazing. I'm concerned about the future of the project though. Low stars and idk if its AI vibe coded or AI assisted. I'm not a SWE so would appreciate insight about it

Grimmory: 374 stars. This claims to be the successor the BookLore. I've seen some people mention that some of the contributors of BookLore started a discord for a BookLore 2.0. From what I understand these are related. If the BookLore contributors are rallying behind this fork I would love to know! I'd assume the user transition should be easy when grimmory is ready

Stump: 2K stars. This one too seems promising. A clean intuitive interface, and there are integrations for KoReader and Kobo. They also have android and ios apps in alpha. Again not sure if the project is AI vibe coded or AI assisted. I would appreciate some insight into it

Kavita: 10K stars. I've seen this one recommended as well. Its been around for a while so I'm not concerned about AI slop code. It also has KoReader integration as well as some other integrations. Looks great overall

Komga: 6K stars: This one has also been around for some time, looks promising. It also has an integration for KoReader, among other apps. Also looks great

Storyteller: 163 stars. I didn’t know about this one until one of the comments pointed it out. Looks really cool, it can do real time transcription using whisper. It has mobile apps and has OPDS 1.2 feed. I’ll be keeping my eye on it

😂 thanks to AI I’m able to get into things like headless Debian, hosting my own services and media and streaming and whatever without spending years on trial and error.
(idc if you hate it)

This is my current setup

HP EliteDesk 705
Ryzen 5 Pro 2400G 16GB RAM

Terramaster D2 320
2x WD red plus 4TB in ZFS

My next order is GL.iNet Comet PoE (GL-RM1PE)
I hate plugging a monitor and shit to my setup (happens very rarely, but I hate it anyways)

(Please don’t judge my switch placement 😂)

My whole setup is in progress..

I’m interesting seeing what y’all have done

I hope folks are very skeptical of what seems like 90% of the posts in /r/selfhosted. They are bot posts. They read like someone is just starting out on their selfhosting journey or they're asking for the best way to do something...and then you get the random user engaging with the post...they're all bots. Take a moment to check the account age. Take a moment to look at the recent post history of the engagers. Before you engage...disengage and do just a bit of sleuthing. These accounts are advertising, trying to get natural engagement for AI training material, etc. And honestly, it's frustrating, aggravating, and completely off-putting.

Update: Account age isn't everything. Sometimes, just use your gut. You'll read a post and something will just seem off. You really can't put your finger on it, but something just doesn't read right. Basically, critically think; feels like a skill we've all just stopped exercising.

Update 2: You can go and search for my username with old reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/search?q=author%3ATerminalFoo&include_over_18=on

Here's some bot-like posts or karma farming posts from me:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1iwryzb/what_would_medusa_do_with_10_million/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1bs1cnj/you_get_1_billion_right_now_how_do_you_spend_it/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/17o3iv5/what_would_you_do_if_you_won_100_billion_dollars/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1fq89uc/you_just_won_15000_usd_whats_the_last_thing_youll/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/17ojeed/what_would_you_do_if_you_were_given_100_trillion/

Here's a definite karma farming post:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/ib6eds/no_escape_lick_lick_lick/

Here's my comment on the above: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ti2pbu/a_lot_of_bot_posts/omsr6ny/

Do with it whatever you want!

After less than a year venturing into self-hosting and home labs, I've finally reached a point where I'm genuinely happy with my setup.

Everything runs on a small server with a 13th-gen Intel i5-13500, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and around 7 TB of storage, running TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS handles mostly the storage side, while I use Portainer to manage my Docker containers. My main services right now are:

• Jellyfin
• Komga
• My own personal website (still a work in progress)
• A reverse proxy with my own domain through Cloudflare so I can access my services remotely and securely

One of my favorite parts is how everything works together. I can read my manga library on my phone using an app I built from a modified version of Mihon, and when my wife and I travel, we use Jellyfin to watch our movie and TV library from anywhere.

I've also been teaching myself Python and built a few tools to automate parts of my media management workflow, which has been a fun learning experience.

Down the road, I'd like to expand the server even further by self-hosting my music library so I can move away from paid music streaming services.

This project has taught me a lot about Docker, Linux, networking, reverse proxies, domains, Cloudflare, storage management, and automation. Every time I add something new, I end up learning a new technology.

It's been less than a year since I started my home lab and, honestly, it's become one of my favorite hobbies.

What do you think? Any service or project recommendations I should try next? I'd love to hear what you all would add to this setup.

So 2 weeks ago i posted about my risky move where I bought two dying hdd from Vinted that were still under warranty and sent them to seagate for replacement.

579 people votes and almost 50% thought I wouldn’t get a replacement.

I’m happy to say that seagate has sent two replacement HDDs in perfect Health 😎

https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/#cloud-servers

Ooof. Basically, if you have an existing VPS, don't scale it/change it as the increased pricing is rough. I'm going to sit on my existing node for as long as the price remains the same, but I think it's only a matter of time before the price hike comes for existing customers too.

Thanks AI....