'Self-hosting is having a moment' ⭘
Sholly, a self-professed "old-school RSS junkie," wanted one place to find the most commonly recommended apps and news about their changes and updates. It didn't exist, so he assembled it, coded it, and shared it. He also started writing about the scene in his newsletter, which has more personality and punch than you'd expect from someone in a largely open source, DIY-minded hobby.
After Plex increased subscription prices and changed its business model in March, Sholly wrote in his newsletter that, while there were valid concerns about privacy and future directions, it would be a good time to note something else: The majority of people don't donate to a single self-hosted project.
Among roughly 3,700 responses from the self-hosting community in 2024 (nearly double the 2023 returns), 60 percent said "no" to the question "Have you donated to a self-hosted project in the last year?" This is despite Plex being in third place for respondents' favorite self-hosted application, behind Jellyfin and Home Assistant.
I've fallen into a rabbit hole at the cross-section of self-hosting, home networking, and home labs over the past few years.
It's been a lot of fun to tinker and fiddle with a variety of tools and, to an extent, reclaim some degree of (or illusion of) control of (some of) our data as a family.
Having said that, I've come to feel a certain degree of apprehension through the process. The developers are generally trustworthy and the community is quite supportive and positive. But there's also an extraordinary level of entitlement in the userbase that I just cannot abide. The dysfunction in the relationship is resulting in project abandonment, shifts to more predatory business models, and otherwise. It all feels untenable and a lot of tools feel fragile as a result.
In the indie Apple world, this is a hill we climbed over a decade ago. Developers were charging one-off, inexpensive amounts for software and it was the height of controversy.
Today, that community has come to (generally) grasp that, in order to have a sustainable tool, the developers must have an equally sustainable business model. But that's not a realisation that extends into all communities and, more broadly, certainly not in the populace at large.
In the self-hosted community specifically, many people are opting for these tools specifically in response to subscription pricing, cloud services, privacy concerns, and so on. They talk about seeking out tools with "FOSS" principles (i.e., Free and Open Source Software). Fair enough. I understand (and agree with elements of) the spirit of it. But the emphasis on Free is troublesome. It creates an imbalanced relationship, which casts the long-term viability of a project into doubt.
I'm increasingly dissatisfied with 1Password, for instance. There are a lot of FOSS alternatives, some of which offer more iOS/macOS native experiences. But do I really want to trust sensitive data to a hobbyist, unpaid tool? I realise that's a reductive perspective, but it's the lens through which I view a lot of things in the space.
Same goes for browsers. I've been using Arc for the past couple of years — venture-backed with no clear business model — but the version I enjoy appears destined to be shuttered. And I have no interest in the AI-first successor they're building. All signs point back toward Firefox — or Zen, which borrows heavily from Arc — but there are plenty of warning signs around Mozilla these days too.
On a smaller level, poking around Github, it's not hard to find promising tools that many people have latched onto, which've since become inactive.
With all of that in mind, as I read this 'interview' earlier today, I was struck by a few thoughts:
First, I've wholeheartedly enjoyed building out my little home lab, as well as assembling a stack of thoughtfully made iOS/macOS apps over the years. I like the feeling of hosting a handful of services for photos, backups, and the like, particularly as mainstream cloud services have become so costly, intrusive, and bloated. It's all a little finnicky, but has scratched an itch for me.
Second, I've come to approach it all with a certain amount of self-awareness and skepticism. I've seen a great many iOS apps fade away over the years for lack of a sustainable model. And that seems tenfold the case in the self-hosted space.
Third — and related to all of the above — I struggle with the ambient hypocrisy around this entire ecosystem. People vehemently against companies that've raised outside capital, but who expect services to be provided to them for $0. People who take a stand and refuse to pay for a particular service, but then also lodge demanding feature requests and complaints for the free, volunteer-based equivalent. (God forbid if they want to go full-time on a project and need to generate some income too.)
A particular point of irony, of course, is that many of the users overlap between the little iOS community and the self-hosted scene. It's not hard to come across indie developers in the iOS ecosystem charging for their apps, but complaining vociferously about paying for software they use outside of that ecosystem.
(Relatedly, it's worth noting that we're at the height of this dynamic with the rise of AI and LLMs. The indie Apple community greeted it all, as is tradition, with ardent criticism and rejection. Now, everyone appears to be coming around to it. Soon, people will be all in on it.)
Is there a singular sustainable model in all of this? I think much of that question depends on the product in question and, by virtue of the pace of the industry, I think the answer is generally "no," with some exceptions. It's a moving target, it's complicated, and it's important not to become overly reliant on any particular tool or platform as a result. You have to be comfortable moving around and changing, which, also ironically, is a major weakpoint for a lot of people in this community.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm tired of people speaking in absolutes about something that's anything but. You can't be morally outraged by a company raising venture capital on principle, only to then refuse to make a token donation to a piece of FOSS that you self-host in its place. You can't be outraged by an indie developer building something on their own dime looking to generate some income, only to then switch to the free venture-backed alternative. All of these behaviours drive each other.
In the case of the outrage over Plex's pricing model — and the statistic above that 60% of users provide little-to-no financial support for tools they use in the self-hosted space — I find it all particularly embarrassing.
If you rely on something that someone is spending a lot of time, energy, and capital to make, you should probably be paying for it. If you refuse to do so (or don't have the option!), you should expect to give something up in return, whether its your privacy or the stability/longevity of the tool.