Previously on isoul.uk: From Veoh and Justin.tv to Self-Hosting My Own Media — streaming solved the convenience problem, but it did not solve the ownership problem.
For a long time I treated online accounts as permanent.
Why wouldn’t I?
I had used the same main account for roughly two decades. Over that kind of period an account stops feeling like an account and starts feeling like infrastructure.
Email goes there.
Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Self-Host — a technical curiosity became a practical choice about ownership, privacy, learning and keeping data in systems I control.
It is slightly ridiculous that one line can connect watching anime on Veoh around 2007 with running Docker containers on a mini PC in my house today.
But there is a line.
Back then, I was interested in one thing: finding something I wanted to watch.
Previously on isoul.uk: The Internet Used to Feel Different — forums had addresses, communities had places and discovery was active before feeds took over.
There are much easier ways to use technology than self-hosting.
If I want photo storage, somebody will sell it to me.
If I need file sync, there are dozens of services.
If I want media streaming, I can pay a subscription and install an app.
Instead, I have ended up with NASes, Docker hosts, virtual machines, DNS servers, monitoring, backups and enough cables to make the “easy” option look extremely sensible.
Previously on isoul.uk: Discovering Anime on the Wild Internet of 2007 — the internet stopped being a reference tool and became the place we went to find what to watch next.
I don’t think the old internet was necessarily better.
It was slower, less reliable, full of broken links and often much harder to use.
But it did feel different.
The easiest way I can describe it is that I used to feel as though I was moving through the internet. Today it often feels as though the internet moves through a handful of feeds towards me.
Installing a media server is the easy part.
It may not feel easy the first time. There are unfamiliar settings, folders that refuse to appear and devices that behave differently for no obvious reason. Eventually, though, the application starts. A film plays on the television. An album appears on a phone. The small thrill of having built something useful is real.
For a while, that can feel like the finished project.
A copy of a file is not automatically a backup, and a backup is not automatically a preservation system. Self-hosting becomes much easier to reason about when these three jobs are kept separate.
Synchronisation keeps copies convenient # Synchronisation keeps data available on more than one device. Syncthing is useful for this kind of direct device synchronisation, and it makes working files available where I need them.
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.
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.
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