this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
486 points (99.2% liked)

Selfhosted

52803 readers
667 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
 

Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chunes@lemmy.world 16 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

maybe I've been living under a rock but I don't get all this emphasis on hosting. What's wrong with having a file on your device that you just play when you want to

[–] groet@feddit.org 18 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

That is the smallest scale of self hosting. The server and the client are the same device. It is also the most insecure way as you probably don't have any backups and very limited storage space.

Actually self hosting is the next step when you decide you want 5+ TB of data and have it automatically create backups. Digital storage media degrade pretty quickly and if you just have your movies on a hard drive in your computer, after 5-10 years you might start to lose quality or some files completely.

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 points 18 minutes ago

While true, neither backups nor checksums are exclusive to hosting anything.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 hours ago

What a lie use zfs or btrfs it solves those. I've been using zfs for probably close to 10 years and have never had a flip yet. And yes I scrub my pool.

[–] damo_omad@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago

You do have the file on a device... On a server, and you can play it on any client you like

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 7 points 14 hours ago

Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.

If you don't need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 5 points 15 hours ago

For me, it's a matter of restoring the convenience and UX that you've given up by leaving the big providers.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

There's nothing wrong with that, but self hosting opens up so much more flexibility, much like cloud hosted services we're used to. Jellyfin is like a personal Netflix where you can watch your movies on any device at any time. The convenience is obvious. For most cloud hosted services, there's an alternative that can be self hosted, and then you actually own your shit.

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 points 24 minutes ago

Mainly just multi-device access.