this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
688 points (97.4% liked)

Selfhosted

52703 readers
594 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

collapsed inline media

One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.

Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don't know.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

The extension of the argument I'm making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it's functionally the same as if the software were political.

You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.

So even if it's not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I think those are important hairs to split.

Let's say there's a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it's a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there's no violation.

Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.

Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.

Is that system now fascist? It's the same exact system as in the previous example, it's just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.

Yes, it's theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that's an incredibly narrow definition.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 17 hours ago

Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn't really mean that it's not functionally political.

If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn't mean the intention all along wasn't more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it's use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.

In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.