Self-Host Weekly (19 September 2025)

SPONSORED BY    Passbolt

Weekly Highlights

One of the first posts I published after launching selfh.st a few years ago was an opinion piece on the toxicity of the developers and community of Tiny Tiny RSS, a popular self-hosted RSS platform. At the time, I was frustrated with their lack of patience towards new users and the imagery used to shame them on the project's public forums (gas chambers).

My opinions have evolved a bit since then, mostly driven by two years' of my own interactions with some of the worst members of the FOSS community (those who either feel a sense of entitlement towards software or content they're receiving for free or can't be bothered to put in a minimum amount of effort when encountering roadblocks).

Earlier this week, however, I was reminded of this dynamic between developers and the community after being tagged in a dumpster fire of a Reddit thread on r/selfhosted posted by u/ElevenNotes – a user well-known for their optimized versions of popular images and inflammatory responses to users who disagree with them.

It's difficult to deny the value ElevenNotes brings to the table – they seem to be completely transparent behind what motivates them and open source 100% of their work. Despite this, harsh reactions to users questioning their methods and constant censorship of public interactions also makes supporting their efforts a hard sell.

I wish I had something profound or insightful to share with parties on either side, but I don't. Developers and creators have every right to respond to requests and feedback how they see fit, while users should also be free to voice their opinions – wrong as they may be. However, consider your presentation if you're voicing feedback to effect change and don't be surprised when others match your energy in their responses.

Other unrelated news for those who don't read this newsletter for the wall of text:

• A few new YouTube video download/management apps joined the scene this week – HomeTube, Youtarr, and yt-dlp-co2
• Home Assistant turned 12 years-old (they should hire the Dropout actor who used to do increasingly complex September music videos every year)
• Undb announced they're joining Teable, although I've scoured the internet for details and can't find anything other than a small announcement on Undb's homepage (thanks for the tip, anonymous reader)
• Mastodon officially announced paid hosting options to establish a more sustainable financial base
• LimeWire – yes, that LimeWire – bought the Fyre Festival brand for some reason?

Happy selfh.st/ing!

Newswire

Keep changing: How Open Source has to continually evolve

Wrapping up 4-years term as OSI executive director.

Open Source Initiative •Stefano Maffulli

An Open-Source Maintainer’s Guide to Saying No

Stewardship in the age of cheap code

Hosting a LAN party using Proxmox and Docker

My girlfriend recently remembered a childhood game she used to play with her sister and wished they could play again: W…

Fouad's Blog •Fouad Chamoun

Redlib — Self-hosted Reddit browsing without the bloat

Redlib is a blazing-fast, privacy-first alternative frontend for Reddit built in Rust. Born from the ashes of Libreddit…

Akash Rajpurohit •Akash Rajpurohit

Happy 12th Birthday, Home Assistant!

This year we’re sharing some stories from the community and some stats about our growth.

Home Assistant •Missy Quarry

The full program for the Nextcloud Community Conference 2025 is here! Welcoming open source enthusiasts from around the world - Nextcloud

Discover the full agenda of the Nextcloud Community Conference 2025, including open source talks, workshops, and more, …

Nextcloud •Katrin Goethals

Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch

TechCrunch spoke to experienced coders about their time using AI-generated code about what they see as the future of vi…

TechCrunch •Dominic-Madori Davis

Software Updates

New Software

Recently Discovered

Project Updates

Feedback

Content Spotlight

Meet TaskTrove, a privacy-respecting task management platform. With TaskTrove, users are given a modern, responsive web interface to add, update, and manage tasks from any device for virtually any project. Features include quick adds via natural language date parsing, due date suggestions, recurring tasks, subtasks, Kanban views, filtering, sorting, search, multi-user collaboration, and more.

TaskTrove can be easily installed via Docker and doesn't require any additional containers for deployment.

Links: Website, Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• Palmr: Self-Hosted File Sharing Made Easy (With Some Caveats) | DB Tech
• I Replaced Nginx Proxy Manager with Traefik in My Home Lab | VirtualizationHowTo
• Chhoto URL Shortener - Open Source, Self Hosted, Efficient and Powerful | Awesome Open Source
• You Probably Have 1000s of Vulnerabilities... Wazuh Walkthrough | Jim's Garage
• Docker Swarm Mode: EASY Tutorial | Christian Lempa

Command Line Corner

Use date "<format>" to easily view the date and time in a particular format directly from the command line (best paired with aliases for easy reference):

$ date "+%F %T"
  2025-09-19 08:00:00

Executive Sponsors

Thanks to following executive sponsors, whose continued support makes this newsletter possible:

• Christian Cleberg

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