Self-hosting is often presented as an answer to every problem. I do not think it is. A service can be open source, privacy-friendly and technically interesting while still being the wrong thing for me to operate. Every service adds updates, storage, monitoring, backups, permissions and another failure mode. The aim is not to recreate every cloud product at home. The aim is to keep control where control is valuable without turning the homelab into a second job. ...
Self-hosting is becoming more interesting for a reason that has little to do with fashionable infrastructure. People are discovering that services they relied on can become worse while they are still using them. Features disappear. Prices change. Limits arrive. Advertising takes over. A product that began as useful becomes harder to use, less private or dependent on an account that can be closed. Cory Doctorow calls this process enshittification. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he argues that platforms can first attract users with convenience, then lock in users and businesses before shifting value away from both groups.1 The Creative Salon article supplied alongside this book is another useful reference point for the discussion.2 ...
A useful project is not automatically worth adding just because it is new, popular or active on GitHub. I look for a clear problem, sensible deployment, useful documentation, a workable backup path and enough maintenance history to justify the time spent learning it. This list deliberately excludes tools already used here, including Beszel, Dockhand and youtube-dl workflows. Karakeep is also excluded as a recommendation because it is already in use and has proved to be good in practice. ...