Selfhosted

I overheard a Mastodon user refer to self-hosting as indie computing this week and I can't stop thinking about it. Maybe it's the coolness factor, or just a welcome reprieve from the virtue signaling and crankiness that is becoming increasingly associated with self-hosting. Either way, I'm stealing it. In actual news, there was a ton of headline-worthy activity this week. And because my love language is bullet points... • Cal.com officially thinks open source is dead and announced they're taking the platform closed source for security-related reasons • Cloudflare introduced the world to Cloudflare Mesh, a new private networking tool (mostly targeted at AI workflows) that may end up as a serious rival to Tailscale, NetBird, and similar platforms • Whoogle, a privacy meta search engine, dropped its final release after years of working around Google's increasingly hostile scraping restrictions • YouTuber DB Tech published some great breakdowns outlining several recent open source supply chain attacks that are impacting self-hosted projects • Booklore – yes, Booklore – is back with a new repo and minor release just a month after completely dismantling any good will the project had with the community • Allbirds, the environmentally-friendly (and struggling) footwear manufacturer, pulled a Kodak and announced they're transitioning into an AI company (?) • Unraid and 45HomeLab finally revealed their hardware collab, a pre-built server starting at – brace yourself – $2,999. (No need for sarcasm here, the jokes write themselves.) • The developer of SilverBullet, a powerful note-taking tool, launched a beta for SilverBullet+ – a desktop version of the software (currently macOS only) intended to help fund future development • Nextcloud announced Nextcloud Ethical AI Ratings, a new tool to help users identify models that are open source, self-hostable, or trained using publicly available data • Raspberry Pi OS has finally disabled the default passwordless sudo in its v6.2 rel

Weekly Highlights Microsoft's Xbox division earned a ton of goodwill with the community this week after its new CEO brought a slew of changes to the platform, including a rebrand from 'Microsoft Gaming' back to 'Xbox', Game Pass price decreases, a new logo, and an upcoming partnership with Discord (ew, David). What does this have to do with self-hosting? Nothing, but it's been a fantastic distraction from a few other shady things they're up to that will quietly impact many of us, like: • Automatically opting GitHub CLI users into telemetry collection • Trying to make 'vibe working' a thing with a new Copilot mode in its Office suite • Large-scale voluntary staff reductions amid increased AI productivity But before you pat yourself on the back with the smug sense of superiority so many of us feel as we look down on our SaaS-ridden counterparts, the grass wasn't necessarily greener on the other side this week: • Bitwarden CLI was compromised in an upstream supply chain attack • The KitchenOwl (grocery lists, recipes) GitHub repo went down after the developer's account was mistakenly flagged for malicious activity (although it seems to be back up now) • Mastodon's flagship server was hit by a major DDoS attack • Nextcloud, Euro-Office, LibreOffice, Collabora, and others are still bickering over what I've now dubbed The Office Wars (read my 4/3 and 4/10 intros for additional context) But, hey – somebody developed a customizable remote control card for Home Assistant that I'm looking forward to configuring this weekend, so that's something. Happy selfh.st/ing! https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-04-24/

Weekly Highlights Newsletter Update: I'm traveling next week and will not be publishing an issue for the first time since February 2023. Don't worry – I'll be back on 5/15 with an extended issue to make up for any content missed. It's been a week for AI companies, and the ripple effects are having both positive and negative impacts across the self-hosted and open source landscapes. To kick things off, Anthropic gave Pro users (and this company) a scare after an update to its pricing page indicated potential plans to remove Claude Code from the tier for new subscribers (the most popular among hobby users). Just a few days later, users began reporting the company was also planning to lock their flagship Opus model behind an additional paywall, although this was later debunked. In the meantime – while certain self-hosted communities were rejoicing at the thought of vibe coders losing cheap access to capable AI models – Blender, the popular open source 3D modeling program, announced Anthropic is joining their corporate patron program. And while someone in my socials claimed users have since uninstalled it in droves – I couldn't find any evidence to support it and am not sure it's even necessary given the lack of decision-making powers donors have per the software's funding policy. Meanwhile in Microsoftland, GitHub's attempt to appease the uptime haters (tl;dr – infrastructure is hard when users are creating 20M new repos a month) was overshadowed by their decision to transition Copilot to usage-based billing. It's not surprising to see public pressure mounting on GitHub, whose CEO is infamous for encouraging developers to embrace AI or get out. It's also somewhat refreshing to finally see some larger projects migrating away from the platform to friendlier alternatives – with BookStack, Endurain, and Ghostty recently leading the charge. And lastly, OpenAI had a different kind of week... If you're tired of everything AI-related (who isn't?), here's some other acti

Weekly Highlights I'm officially back from my brief hiatus (shout-out to those who missed me), and as promised, have sifted through two weeks' worth of content to make up for it. Without further ado: • The race to find major Linux exploits continued last week with Dirty Frag, the latest vulnerability that has maintainers encouraging users to update their systems ASAP (see DB Tech's great coverage of the past few weeks over on YouTube) • GitLab shared their latest letter to investors and (surprise, surprise) they're restructuring their workforce and operations in preparation for the agentic era of software (unrelatedly, Bill Staples sounds like a name I'd make up when filling out a fake form) • Plex is once again increasing the monthly price users must pay to stream their own media (if this is you, why haven't you purchased a lifetime pass yet?) • Bambu Lab, a popular 3D printer manufacturer, is under scrutiny for their response to an open source project using Bambu's own open source code to bypass cloud requirements (Jeff Geerling provides an excellent breakdown here) • There's been some drama surrounding the maintenance (or lack thereof) of MkDocs (static sites/documentation) and a new community-backed fork called ProperDocs has emerged as a response • The website for JDownloader (download manager) was recently compromised, replacing official download links with malware-laced installers • Rahoot!, a new learning-based quiz platform, has been rebranded as Razzia after having its repo disabled for trademark violations a few weeks ago • In smart home automation, Home Assistant officially picked up support for radio frequency in its May release (hot on the heels of infrared support in April) and Homebridge recently added support for Matter • Immich (photos) passed 100,000 stars on GitHub • Somebody developed a Rocky (Project Hail Mary) assistant for the Raspberry Pi Zero Correction: In the 5/1 newsletter, I referenced a new Notepad++ app for macOS only to later discov

Weekly Highlights Last week, I "jokingly" encouraged Plex users to consider grabbing a lifetime pass after the platform announced a recent round of price increases for customers paying a monthly subscription to stream their own media. And for that – I apologize. I have no solid evidence, but can only assume this week's decision to triple the lifetime plan cost to $750 is a direct response to my repeated insistence that you all PURCHASE A LIFETIME PASS. (If somebody from Plex is actually reading this, please consider sponsoring the newsletter.) In all seriousness, it's unlikely that Plex actually believes the value of its lifetime pass is $750 (the new mobile experience is still atrocious, after all). At a time when discontinuing lifetime plans is heavily scrutinized, it's a convenient way to 'retire' the subscription without actually getting rid of it. As a bonus, they'll also receive a brief influx of cash from users rushing to purchase at the lower price before the increase takes effect on July 1st. And while this may be the tipping point that finally pushes some to other alternatives, the Jellyfin team also shared they'll be quadrupling its price to take advantage of Plex's bad publicity (editor's note: 4 x $0 = $0). In other news of the stupid, Bitwarden and its new CEO briefly removed 'Always Free' from the platform's pricing page, Google is destroying search, and a Twitter user had the world's worst take on AI. Other activity you should be aware of: • 3,800 GitHub repos (not to be confused with GotHub) were breached via a malicious VS Code extension • Proxmox released PVE 9.2, which includes a dynamic load balancer and custom CPU model management among other enhancements • Somebody created a 20GB archive of ~2,000 commercials from 2000-2015 to troll your Plex Jellyfin users with • The Komodo (deployment) team is facilitating a survey on container management • A newsletter reader has resurrected the r/MPD subreddit (Music Player Daemon) and would love for

Weekly Highlights If you missed it, the Pope dropped a mixtape this week (TIL the Vatican has its own top-level domain) outlining his thoughts on the co-existence of humans and artificial intelligence, and it's a banger: MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCESetting aside a quote from Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) in a section titled We can all do our part, the 52-page document is a fascinating read and a well-articulated case against AI's unregulated growth and long-term impact on society. The document itself is a fairly accessible read for both religious and non-religious people alike, but I personally found Simon Willison's highlights super helpful for those looking for the tl;dr version, which include the following snippets (among others): • Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” • Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others... • The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them... • Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. To be clear, I'm not advocating for or against AI or the Pope (although I should disclose that my cat's name is Leo, but for unrelated reasons). I simply find it wild to see a technological advancement so controversial that the Vatican felt compelled to weigh in (can they please do open source next?). Unfortunately, the reality is that AI has created tension in the self-hosted community that doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. As we continue to wrestle with SEO-laden slopware and vulnerable codebases, these snipp

Weekly Highlights As a perpetually online person, I often have to remind myself that the communities I spend time with rarely represent the opinion of the broader population (echo chambers, vocal minorities, etc.). And so as I spent the week listening to everyone blast Plex for launching yet another feature nobody asked for, I found myself wondering how untrue that probably is and whether any of the platform's 42 million active monthly users would actually find themselves negatively impacted. After all, those of us in the open source and self-hosted communities (myself included) are notorious for not practicing what we preach: • 92% of the 1,500+ projects I follow via selfh.st/apps host their source code on GitHub • Of the 50+ Discord project communities I'm a member of, only two migrated to other platforms after the age verification debacle • Before Reddit stopped publishing subscriber counts, the r/selfhosted subreddit had at least 5x more subscribers than Lemmy's sister community • It's almost impossible to find new projects that haven't leveraged AI, while larger existing projects are adopting it at a rapid pace • Brands still seem to have a larger presence on X and Bluesky than self-hosted platforms like Mastodon • Projects still gravitate to Microsoft Office and Google Drive for collaborative exercises (1, 2, 3) So while we shouldn't stop advocating for change because we're awful at enacting it, just know that I won't judge you for taking advantage of Plex's new social features to finally let your family and friends know just how much you disliked the latest season of Grey's Anatomy. In other news: • The rsync team found themselves in hot water for leveraging AI in a recent update (you can find the maintainer's response here) • Somebody really wants people to stop naming their projects *arr (admittedly, they are getting a bit out of hand) • Popular YouTuber PewDiePie once again dipped his toe into self-hosting with the launch of Odysseus, a no-frills appr

Weekly Highlights Every so often, I revisit the collection of apps I monitor for selfh.st/apps to flag projects that are no longer maintained and prevent them from being recommended to readers (some day I'll get around to creating a separate view for them). Given the relatively slow news week, I thought I'd pay tribute to a few of these projects. In alphabetical order: • Commento: Popular commenting platform for blogs before built-in comments became the norm • CouchPotato: Media downloader before the *arrs were a thing • Gelli: A very early and capable Jellyfin music client for Android that pioneered the way for many modern clients • kbin: The OG content aggregation service that was popular during the Reddit exodus and the foundation for mbin • Librum: Minimal, modern e-book reader known for its clean interface • Pinry: The closest 1:1 alternative to Pinterest (image boards) before bookmarking and read-later platforms took off • Self-Hosted Gateway: Tunneling alternative to Cloudflare and Tailscale (that now links to a Minecraft server project?) • Sheetable: Music sheet organization platform that (to my knowledge) doesn't have a modern open source replacement • Yacht: Container management platform before container management platforms were cool (although I'm not sure this one ever left beta) Similarly, here are a few projects that made a splash at launch but never received more than 1-2 months of development (what we'd call the AI effect today): • Gmail Cleaner: Web-based interface for cleaning Gmail mailboxes • MedAssist: Medication tracking and reminders • Metadata Remote: Web-based music metadata editor • pad.ws: Whiteboard as an IDE • Subvert: Video AI subtitle, chapter, and summary generator And lastly, an honorable mention: the DumbWare suite of apps. They aren't technically unmaintained, but much of the hype has fizzled after a short burst of app launches last year. According to the project's Discord, the developer recently had a baby and is taking time o

Weekly Highlights This week, Immich – the popular Google Photos alternative that continues to ignore my desperate pleas for tags on mobile – announced it's switching to release candidates as the team prepares its v3 update (mobile non-destructive editing, workflows, and the ability to use it as a gallery app on Android). Leveraging release candidates is a welcome reprieve from the project's usual update cadence, which often sees a major release followed by 2-3 subsequent bug fixes (1, 2, 3) within the time span of just a few days. As someone who combs through thousands of releases a week, I've never found Immich's update practices to be much of a bother – despite having made it all the way to v1.144.1 before making the jump to v2. For my own internal purposes, I bucket the various projects I follow into one of several categories based on timing and execution: • By the Book: Projects that release at a steady cadence with intuitive versioning. Home Assistant is a great example, with early monthly releases followed by a handful of bug fixes throughout the month. • Short Burst: Projects that occasionally drop a major release followed by a short burst of bug fixes before going dark for several weeks or months (<– Immich sits here). • Rapid Fire: Projects that very frequently release major and minor releases (usually an indicator of AI assistance or vibe coding). The now defunct Huntarr was a great example of this, and modern projects like Poznote and Yuvomi follow a similar trend. • Group Chat: Projects that manage multiple apps in a single repository, making their release feeds noisy and a bit of a headache. Ente and Posthog are the biggest culprits in this category. • Strong, Silent Type: Projects that don't share any notes in their release feeds (Grav is a good example from this past week). • Personality: Projects that have fun with their releases, like Passbolt's release names/songs or BentoPDF's dad jokes. • Off the Grid: Projects that don't publish releases and

Weekly Highlights Hey selfh.st/ers! Ethan is traveling, so FoxxMD here with a guest intro for you this week. Many of you host your own websites/apps and you may even host your own identity provider to sign into those apps, but how do you handle identity ownership outside of your network? Likely you have accounts on individual sites, or maybe you use SSO with a big provider like Google. Either way, someone else ultimately owns that account since any app using it would have to contact google.com (as an example) to verify your identity. Wouldn't it be nice to own the whole identity stack, though? Even outside your network? Perhaps even self-host all the data for each app using that identity? Let me tell you the Good News about ATProto. Although most commonly known for powering Bluesky, the AT Protocol is much more expansive, and agnostic, than the company that founded it. ATProto defines how to find and authenticate your identity, how and where your data is stored, and how apps consume it. Critically, each layer of the AT Protocol can be operated by independent entities (self-hosted!) and your domain is your identity. That's right: if you own a domain, then with a few DNS records, you can own your ATProto identity, which defines where your data lives for each app that accesses it. And that data location can easily be self-hosted. The ecosystem of apps using ATProto is larger than Bluesky, and growing rapidly. Learn more about what you can do with an (ATProto) Atmosphere Account. In other news: • Valve launched the Steam Machine at an eye-wateringly high $1,050 USD due to *gestures at everything*, but with the silver lining that SteamOS is publicly available and works with more hardware. • Ryan Moulton wrote a piece on the basics of screen color space and where to find colors your screen can't show you. • A dark wizard ported the entirety of Quake to CSS. Yes, like HTML/CSS. • Iroh, a new application-level P2P protocol, announced v1.0. • To no one's delight except

Weekly Highlights This week, a new non-profit called The Human-Centered Computing Foundation (HCCF) announced they're launching a campaign for a new top-level domain dedicated to self-hosting (.self). Likely a response to the modern internet's transparency problems with AI and bots, the foundation is proposing a few features to ensure the new TLD avoids the same spammy reputations shared by other modern domains (.xyz), which include limiting domains to one per person, shared services via open source software (VPN and mail), and open governance. My own private conversations with the non-profit's founders have left me feeling optimistic about their goals and motives, despite how difficult some of this may be to actually implement. For example, how do you limit every person to a single domain? Will I have to fight other Ethans for ethan.self? How often do we see projects implement open governance successfully? If you're looking to contribute or provide feedback, the HCCF has spun up a Discourse forum for anyone who'd like to chime in. (Avoid the announcement post's comment section on the website itself, where users – in typical FOSS fashion – are mostly just debating the foundation's decision to release their announcement via PDF over other open formats.) In other news and activity: • Immich quietly discontinued the retro installation disk launched with v2 in their new v3 release, marking the official death of physical media in self-hosting • Ente, best known for their open source Photos platform, announced they're committing to openness by publicly publishing a dashboard of their business metrics (revenue, number of customers and accounts) • Codeberg went down for 7 hours (the amount of time it takes to figure out how Forgejo Actions work, or the half-life of a Show HackerNews post) • Somebody developed a mobile music streaming app compatible with Navidrome, Subsonic, Jellyfin, etc., that mimics the look and feel of the iPod Classic • OpenClaw, the infamous open s

Weekly Highlights This week, Linus Torvalds (the CEO of Linux) found himself scolding the community for its backlash against AI in response to development concerns over Sashiko, an agentic Linux kernel code review system. If you're too lazy to read the memo, below are the snippets I found the most notable in what eventually led to the creator telling AI haters to (literally and figuratively) fork it: > I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. > Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. > There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. > The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side. > Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either. > The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology. > And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools. Naturally, Torvalds' remarks created a bit of a stir among both those in disagreement with his takes and those who find his methods of communication too crass. (TBD on how this will impact this week's milestone release of Hannah Montana Linux v26.) In other news, Windows also had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week as researchers revealed a 0-day exploit the same day Microsoft's Patch Tuesday release addressed a record-breaking number of security fixes. Other activity and happenings you should be aware of: • The team behind Fluxer, a promising open source Discord alternative, announced they're finalizing the project's API and self-hosting documentation (although maybe a bit too late given the release of Chatto, a newer alternative that recently created some buzz

Weekly Highlights This week, the Jellyfin development team gave the FOSS community a mini panic attack after three team leads announced they're leaving the organization (just a few months after implementing a controversial price increase). Initial reactions to the resignations (driven by burnout and internal disagreements) were overwhelmingly positive, both from the community (1, 2, 3) and talking heads looking for an excuse to show off some chest hair in a sketchy hotel room. After all, passing the torch to new developers is a key tenet of successful open source projects. But something feels off. The announcement was shared to the community forums but not the project's official blog – suggesting it may have been a last-minute decision. It also includes an introduction that completely glosses over the departure of the project's co-founder, Andrew Rabert, whose exit seems to have kicked off the series of events: Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. We leave the project in the very capable hands of the remaining team who have been driving the project for many years now. Rabert – also the lead behind Jellyfin's official desktop client – referenced his resignation in a GitHub issue created last Friday. Citing burnout and interactions with other leadership team members (including pushback for a CLAUDE.md file in violation of Jellyfin's LLM guidelines), the co-founder shared his intentions to continue developing the client as an unofficial project where he'd be free from increasingly burdensome and restrictive guidelines. Three days later, the forum post announcing the additional departures went up with little fanfare and no mention of any friction within the team. It's not entirely clear (to me) how connected these events actually are. Admittedly, the timing and vagueness of the forum post suggest eit

Weekly Highlights Over the last year, exploring and digesting content for this newsletter has become more demanding than ever. My content submission form receives upwards of 25+ submissions a day (keep them coming!), and controversial topics like vibe coding, GitHub, and Immich's lack of mobile tag support haven't made it any easier. Despite this, for the first time in months this past week, I found myself completely immersed in a new-ish application (BookBridge) that automatically syncs reading progress across audiobooks and ebooks. And while I'm still ironing out the kinks, the euphoria from getting it to work for the first time was a refreshing reminder of what got me into this hobby in the first place. If this is you, I'm officially granting you permission to skip the unnecessary maintenance this weekend, unplug from the rest of the internet, and dive into that app you've been dying to spin up (or find one TikTok-style). In actual news and activity: • A new self-hosting meme was born after a disgruntled LubeLogger user lectured the developer on closing issues with dignity • The File Browser team announced the project is shutting down and will be archived on 9/1 (may I suggest some alternatives?) • Late last week, Bitwarden (passwords) issued a client update that broke compatibility with the popular Vaultwarden implementation, and users are now being encouraged to update to v1.37.0 to regain client support • If you're one of those people who just can't part with the bells and whistles of Obsidian, a popular community sync plugin released v1.0.0 this week • Earlier this month, Ente (photos) open sourced their business metrics. This week, The Open Home Foundation announced a plan to make their web analytics public. (Virtue signaling is so hot right now.) • Somebody developed a Jellyfin client for the Nintendo 3DS (and I've shamelessly stolen one of the top comments on its release for this week's newsletter subtitle) • A newsletter reader offered shitcode.org in

Weekly Highlights I was tired of I built I spent a few days this past week vibe coding two new apps for my homelab after struggling to find existing platforms that weren't completely overkill for what I was trying to accomplish. The first is an app I've dubbed BookSync (I've never claimed to be creative), a simple interface for syncing progress between Audiobookshelf and my Kindle (semi-inspired by BookBridge, which I referenced last week). The second is TubeStream, an app that generates RSS feeds from YouTube channels and provides on-the-fly audio transcodes when streamed via a podcast client. But here's the catch: I haven't published them anywhere, and I have no plans to. Assuming, of course, that someone might actually be interested in them, the list of reasons not to share them includes (but is not limited to): • They're tailored to my very specific needs • LAN-only access and SSO make potential (unknown) vulnerabilities a non-issue for me, but I can't mitigate the risk for others • I lack the bandwidth to add features and maintain them for others • I'm not familiar enough with Claude's generated code to know which licenses/projects should be credited • My skin isn't thick enough for the wrath of this community (although I found last week's 'Slop-Host Weekly' feedback somewhat entertaining) But as much as I'd love to pat myself on the back for being such a virtuous member of the community, the decision not to share them publicly leaves me feeling a bit bummed. Not only was it incredibly satisfying to watch everything come together with just a $20 Claude Pro subscription, but the stigma associated with vibe coding has left me wondering what else I've been missing out on and what others have built that isn't discoverable. It's undeniable that vibe coding is redefining the self-hosting landscape. And after this week, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't already eyeing up other containers in my stack that are more trouble than they're worth. In other news and activ

Weekly Highlights Let's talk enterprise features. This week, Planka – a popular project management platform that I often confuse with Plinko (yes, there's a Price Is Right fandom page) – removed single sign-on (SSO) capabilities from its community edition in the app's v2.2.0 release. Gating SSO behind a paywall has become a common (and unpopular) method for self-hosted projects to generate income, often dubbed the SSO tax. The strategy relies on the average enterprise's reliance on these capabilities for both security and ease-of-use (users not having to remember multiple passwords, etc.), while often leaving amateur self-hosters (many of whom lack monetary resources) out to dry. Needless to say, Planka's users weren't very happy. And rightfully so. Unlike other platforms that paywall the feature from inception, the decision to remove it now is a bit of a rug-pull for the users who've already invested time, energy, and resources into the platform. But as usual, nothing in this world is black and white. So before you grab your pitchforks, allow me to be the voice of reason: Yes, the SSO tax is obnoxious. Yes, the late-game switch is frustrating. Yes, switching platforms can be time-consuming and counterproductive. Yes, this will leave some users at risk. Yes, paywalling features in a platform that has benefitted from community contributions feels unfair. On the other hand: No, you are not entitled to anything from software you haven't paid for. And that's it. Self-hosted and open source software is a double-edged sword. Developers have the freedom to build and share whatever they'd like, but that same freedom also allows them to make unpopular decisions. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do in response: Fork the project. Respectfully voice your opinions and concerns. Make the switch to one of the many viable alternatives. Vibe code your own. Or – just stop using kanban and manage your tasks in scattered text files like the rest of us. In other

Weekly Highlights Every so often, I poke my head out of my self-hosting hole to (1) appreciate the chaos I avoid by self-hosting, and (2) watch the world burn. This week was one of those weeks. AI watermarking dominated the conversation for much of it (here's a neat primer if you need it). Anthropic was forced to defend Claude's latest capabilities given the EU AI Act's new disclosure requirements, while later that same day, Google announced Gemini users are now able to opt out of visible watermarks on their "creations". We also learned RAM prices have climbed 500% in the last 12 months from a recent study published by Tom's Hardware – just a few days before Stripe announced they're buying OpenRouter for $7.5B. (I wonder if there's a correlation...) And if all of that sounds batsh*t to you, it gets worse: • A Kentucky school shared a bizarre AI-generated map of the U.S. with its students (I'm from Vestrntane, if you've ever wondered) • Some guy hid a prompt injection in his legal filing that encouraged the court's AI to rule in his favor (fortunately, the court confirmed it does not use AI for these reviews) • The BBC uncovered a controversial practice called destructive scanning, where AI companies are buying second-hand books and destroying their spines to make them easier to scan (sounds like they should have consulted with this developer) • Meta launched Pocket, a TikTok-style app for vibe coding mini-games and sharing them with others • A keen-eyed developer discovered Apple's AirPods may have cameras in them based on a video found in the latest macOS release candidate (move over, smart glasses) • Mark Zuckerberg purchased a castle in Ireland (?) We really do live in the strangest timeline. (If you read this newsletter for news that's actually relevant to self-hosting – GitHub experienced an 8-hour outage, Debian is preparing a vote on AI contributions, Plex finally admitted their recent design changes stink, there's a new contender for the worst-named *arr

Weekly Highlights ℹ️Editor's Note: I'm temporarily removing the tag for AI-assisted apps as most projects are using AI in some capacity – and many readers are confusing AI assistance with vibe coding. I'm working on a new system to differentiate that should be live in the next few weeks.Content management systems (CMS) – so hot right now. This week, Cloudflare shared that they've transitioned their official blog onto their own recently launched CMS and spiritual successor to WordPress named EmDash. Setting aside the name (that's clearly trying to take advantage of the AI hype), I have no idea why content management platforms – along with budgeting and note-taking tools – have drawn so many users into reinventing the wheel. I receive at least one user submission each week requesting I feature a new CMS (here are this week's –> 1, 2). And so if you've found yourself with some extra Fable usage and are looking to contribute something unique, let me offer you a brief list of relatively new self-hosted projects to help get your creative juices flowing: • Halcyon Video: Walkable 3D video rental store of items from your media server • Gravity: Interactive solar system simulator • TapMap: Visualize your computer's connections across the world in real-time • pixelReel: Minecraft mod that allows users to stream movies in-game from Jellyfin, Emby, or Plex • Intro Quiz: "Guess the intro" music quiz for family game nights • PKVault: Centralized storage and save tool for Pokémon In other news and activity: • Calibre's latest update allows users to generate book covers using AI • AppFlowy, a collaborative workspace app (and Notion alternative), took some heat for neglecting its community edition after a SQL injection vulnerability was found in its code base • LibreOffice released v26.8 and leaned heavily into the 'no AI' marketing shtick, likely in response to Collabora's recent AI-focused update as the office wars continue • The developer behind Papra (document management) sha

Weekly Highlights It was a relatively slow news week in self-hosting, so before I jump into the typical recap, a few points of housekeeping: • The AI-assisted tag for projects has been temporarily dropped as too many users are confusing 'AI-assisted' for 'vibe coded'. I'm working on a new methodology for tagging projects that will be rolled out in the next week or two. • If you're using LLM-generated text to communicate with me or submit content, I'm going to ignore it. Life is busy and I get wanting to automate things, but I cannot stomach the LLM-isms and cadence of the sentences they produce. • I'm migrating the infrastructure that powers selfh.st/apps and have temporarily paused adding new projects. Everything should be back up and running early next week. With that out of the way – in actual news and activity: • SourceHut announced they're following in Codeberg's footsteps and prohibiting LLM-generated source code on the platform • File Browser has officially been archived on GitHub after announcing the project will no longer be maintained just a few weeks ago • As if the BentoPDF project couldn't get any cooler, the developer open sourced their new PDF standards and compression engines in the platform's latest release • The YOURLS team (URL shortener) accidentally tagged a release incorrectly and followed up with this hilarious response • Debian published the results of its recent vote on AI-assisted contributions, with "Responsible Use of Generative AI" winning out among the nine potential resolutions • If you're still using Plex, you should update your server and clients ASAP • I'm finding it increasingly difficult to take online interactions seriously anymore. Is everyone a bot now? • Have you ever found yourself wondering if a certain GitHub user is a virgin? Wonder no more... Happy selfh.st/ing! https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-09-04/

Weekly Highlights The Jellyfin team took a page from Microsoft's playbook and skipped a major version number (v11) with the release of v12 this week – just three months after its v10.11 release. (While the team provides the rationale behind the jump in the release notes, I can only assume it's because the project's new leadership can't count.) The major update comes packed with a number of new features (proper book support, multi-version episodes, improved recommendations), but the biggest upgrades come in the form of database refinements that users are claiming significantly decrease load times and a new "modern" layout. Meanwhile in Plex-land, over 36,000 servers have yet to upgrade to a urgent security patch the company says addresses several critical vulnerabilities. But don't worry – regardless of where you sit in the self-hosted streaming wars, LG is (allegedly) always watching you... In other news and activity: • Discord's delayed age verification requirements have returned (and I'm sure most of us will continue to not do anything about it) • Bitwarden's latest update allows users to run the password manager rootless and on a read-only filesystem • Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, was placed on a leave of absence (presumably for a number of incidents outlined in the linked article) • ich777, a well known Unraid community developer, announced they're moving on from Unraid (presumably to devote more time to MOS, their new NAS OS for homelabs) • Notifuse (email newsletters) updated the project's license to BSL-1.1 with an incredibly wordy and AI-generated explanation that makes me want to throw my laptop out the window • Papermerge (document management) seems to be on the path to abandonment after the dev announced they're shifting their focus to its cloud/SaaS version • Figranium (workflow automation) took a jab at "open source" projects that actually operate under an open core licensing model • Daniel Brendel – the develo

Weekly Highlights Hey! selfh.st/apps picked up SSO filtering (with its own SSO tax view) and a new trending sort this week. Check them out and let me know if you have any feedback.The developer of the increasingly popular BookOrbit project recently had a bit of a Scooby-Doo moment after being unmasked by the community as the developer of Booklore, a similar app that gained notoriety earlier this year for its sudden disappearance after having been called out for code quality issues, contributor mistreatment, and license abuse. And while there's probably something to be said about second chances, the developer's responses in the linked thread read more like whoops-I've-been-caught than an actual change of heart. The decision to operate under a completely different identity without disclosing the Booklore connection also has yet to be addressed while coming off as somewhat deceptive. I'd recommend steering clear of the project for the time being – regardless of how tempting it might be. In other news and activity: • RustFS, an object storage platform that quickly gained popularity after MinIO sh*t the bed, is now considered generally available with its v1.0.0 release • The Portainer team announced they're dropping the community edition with the release of their upcoming v3.0 release (while still offering three free nodes of the mainline version to all who apply) • Navidrome picked up experimental support for Jellyfin's music API, which means users can now also stream from most Jellyfin clients • Configuring apps from the interface is so hot right now as Frigate (NVR) and Dynacat (dashboard) both picked up the ability to bypass their clunky YAML config files (yuck) • The Raspberry Pi OS September 2026 update finally introduced a dock/launcher to the microcontroller's minimal desktop interface • Users who've been on the fence about making the jump from Tautulli to Tracearr can finally rejoice – newsletters have arrived • LG wants everybody to know that they're not alw

Weekly Highlights Keen-eyed readers will notice a new section in the newsletter this week – a self-hosting-themed puzzle. Inspired by the free daily games from the NYT, it's another way to spotlight self-hosted projects that isn't just a bulleted list of news and software. If you sign in (it's free!) before you play, I'll also be tracking streaks for those who complete each week's game before the next issue drops – so get solving! (This week's game is a Strands-like word search and requires JavaScript, so email readers will need to hop over to the web to play.) On a semi-related note, I'm taking credit for the Stirling PDF team's removal of their OAuth SSO paywall after launching an SSO filter for selfh.st/apps last week. The unexpected move is a refreshing change of pace from the past few weeks, which have seen projects like Planka and Grist pull SSO from their community editions. And while I still stand by a developer's right to charge for pretty much whatever they'd like, it's nice to occasionally see a project move in the opposite direction, even if it's not entirely clear what prompted it (goodwill, competitive pressure, a well-timed directory filter...). You're welcome. In other news and activity: • Raspberry Pi is locking boards to their factory RAM capacity to stop scammers from upgrading low-spec models and reselling them as higher-end ones (and many people are unhappy about it) • Discord's new age verification system went live on Wednesday • autobrr, the team behind the popular qBittorrent frontend qui, announced they're working on librrary, a Sonarr and Radarr replacement • The undb repository on GitHub was archived and has apparently merged with Teable (?) • Meta cited OpenClaw as the inspiration behind their new Muse AI chat app (see also: a Dutch non-profit trolled Meta employees outside their headquarters with Meta's own smart glasses, which are apparently about to ditch the camera) • Rumored a few months ago, Schneider Electric is officially acq

Weekly Highlights Happy Friday! Last week's puzzle launch was a resounding success (over 2,000 completions!), but I also received a ton of helpful feedback from some who found it confusing. To help, I've since added a hint system and more robust instructions on how to play (check it out below!). I've also been working on a system for tagging vibe coded projects, something many of you have been very vocal about since the AI-assisted tags were dropped from the newsletter a few weeks ago. Unfortunately – like everything else – the topic is incredibly nuanced: • Most projects are using AI in some capacity, and too many readers were mistaking AI-assisted for vibe coded when evaluating the software lists below • I don't have the capacity to correctly identify every project – there are simply too many submissions, and sometimes it's not obvious (some devs use AI for their READMEs but not code, etc.) • Some readers want to see popular vibe coded projects – not because they're going to deploy them, but because they can be inspirational for their own personal projects I think I've come up with a decent solution to address all of the above, but I'm still ironing out the kinks. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. In actual news and activity: • An eagle-eyed Home Assistant user noticed a PR that merges the current community store plugin (HACS) into an official system integration called Marketplace • A wild Pinchflat-ngx has appeared – a fork of the popular YouTube video downloader project Pinchflat, which hasn't seen any activity in ~10 months (and if the Pokémon reference was too much of a tease for you, check this out) • Gitea pulled a Java and dropped the '1.' from its versioning, jumping straight from v1.27.3 to v28.0.0 • Nostalgex, a retro cable-like experience for media servers that launched a few months ago, has officially been open sourced • Raspberry Pi announced they're increasing prices for certain models (again) • Nextcloud launched an online academy aimed