Weekly Highlights
Earlier this year, the VPN platform Tailscale announced it had received $160 million in venture funding. This week, in response to community reactions to the news, the company reposted a blog post written by its CEO addressing concerns over potential enshittification of the platform. In it, he explores the term's history and application while outlining several reasons he believes Tailscale is unlikely to fall into the same pitfalls many other platforms face.
The overall sentiment of the post is encouraging, but there's an underlying implication that it'll never happen to Tailscale simply because they don't want it to – as if it's always a matter of choice. Perhaps more intriguing is the number of references to Google, a company infamous for abandoning its early principles.
Like many in the self-hosted community, I'm a strong supporter of Tailscale and believe their product is largely unmatched, so I'll be cheering for them. I'm also hoping I won't have to make a cheesy joke about Tailfail anytime soon.
In other news, if you're looking to pass the time until tonight's fireworks or are trying to distract yourself from the interstellar comet about to pass through the solar system, enjoy this week's lightning round of other notable activity and the staggering number of updates and launches down below:
- The Pingvin Share (file sharing) project has officially been archived as the developer shifts their focus to Pocket ID, a popular authentication platform that popped up last year
- The Trilium-successor TriliumNext (note-taking) project is officially just Trilium as of last week (try saying that five times fast)
- A somewhat promising *arr alternative named MediaManager launched, which seeks to consolidate tracking, downloads, and requests for multiple media types into a single application
- r/selfhosted had an interesting discussion on the acceptability of self-promotion in the open-source community
Happy selfh.st/ing!
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In the News
Ethan Sholly
Paulus Schoutsen
Ashley Belanger
Feedback
Community Content
Vegard S. Hagen
Clémentine
Content Spotlight
Meet Zen Notes, a Markdown-based note-taking app. Developed to be a simpler alternative to some of the more common tools, Zen Notes offers a minimal experience for taking notes with low resource usage while still sporting the basic features required from such an app – tags, tables, code blocks, tasks, highlights, full text search, and more.
Zen Notes can be easily installed via binary or Docker and doesn't require additional containers to deploy.
Links: Website, Source Code
Videos and Podcasts
- Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle | Flipboard
- Everything New In Home Assistant 2025.7! | Everything Smart Home
- Building My Ultimate Frigate CCTV NVR Server | Cameron Gray
- Web Browser Remote Desktop (RDP, SSH, VNC, Telnet) with VPN | Jim's Garage
- Manage Checkmk IT monitoring in Ansible | Christian Lempa
- I Built the Most Ridiculous NAS Ever… and It Actually Works! | 2GuysTek
Command Line Corner
Use ls -lt from the command line to quickly list files and directories by last modified time:
$ ls -lt
Jul 4 07:04 docker-compose.yml
Jul 4 07:02 .env
Jul 4 06:57 example.txtClick here for an archive of commands shared in past newsletters.
Related News and Content
Sourav Rudra
Miranda Bishop
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