Seconding this. Itzg’s server is so easy, I taught my 15 year old niece to run one.

Thanks, I didn’t know about that.

I love Seafile, but I’m not sure it really meets OP’s requirements. For example I’m not aware of any way to do upload without a login in Seafile.

Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.

In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.

I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.

Yes, the underlying model is the same as Tailscale, Zerotier and Netmaker (also worth checking out, btw). Clients connect to a central host (which can be self-hosted) and use that to exchange information on addresses and open ports, then form direct connections to each other.

We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.

The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.

Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.

Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.

Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.

Airsonic or Navidrome server, plus one of the various Subsonic apps. I like Substreamer or Dsub but there are plenty of other options.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I’ll give it a look.

How does this compare to something like Appsmith or Budibase?

Using self-hosting services enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly.

As opposed to what? Using a cloud SaaS alternative, or not having that service at all?

People who influence my behavior think that I should use cloud services.

This question is going to get bad data. No one likes to think of themselves as being influenced. A more effective phrasing would be “…people I trust…”

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don’t try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you’re better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.

So, from what I’ve read, and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.

If that’s the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you’ve done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.

So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I’d say I have two problems.

1. Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy.
2. Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.

I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary (edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

Fair enough. If your family are all tech savvy enough that that’s a good solution for them, then congratulations, and I’m jealous.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.

A question I have about this setup, because I’ve been contemplating out myself: If all the traffic flows through the VPS, I presume that will count against any usage limits / cost per GB with the VPS, right? Have you found that to be a problem with large file transfers or video streaming?

I’ve been running Seafile for over ten years. They released version 12.0 just last month. I’m really not sure why people have this impression that it’s not maintained.

Seafile updates slowly because it’s very much intended as an enterprise product. It has minimal bells and whistles, but the core functionality is reliable and works well. It’s more of a BlackBerry than an iPhone.

In the side by side tests I’ve seen it syncs a lot faster than Nextcloud. I keep my entire documents, downloads and picture folders synced there across three different machines, nearly 300GB of data in total, and I can wipe my laptop and sync all my files back in under and hour. File transfers basically cap out at network speed, even with large numbers of small files. I’ve used the desktop client, the drive client and the mobile client and never had any complaints with any of them.

Sidenote, if you create an account on their site they’ll give you a pro license for up to three users, free forever.

The documentation is a bit of a beast, but worth reading thoroughly. Setup is a little fiddly compared to Nextcloud (that’s a major turn off for a lot of people, understandably so). If you have questions message me and I’ll try to help. If you go with the free pro license, be sure to enable offline garbage collection, it’ll help keep your storage use under control.

Anyway, I really like it, works well for me. Definitely worth trying out.

Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.

It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.