PikaPods
Weekly Highlights
Privacy, cost, convenience, and flexibility were all common responses from users when asked why they self-host in this year's annual survey. Couple this with the number of new projects marketed as "I grew tired of X so I built Y" and a pattern emerges – the rationale behind self-hosting for many often isn't what it has to offer, but rather what it doesn't have to offer (lack of privacy, hidden costs, walled gardens, etc.).
And while there's nothing inherently wrong with this, I've noticed at times it can take away from some of the crazy and cool things people have created (even if it's occasionally AI slop). I find myself guilty of it, too, which is why so many of the topics covered in this newsletter are tech-adjacent and only loosely related to self-hosting.
However, this week – instead of getting riled up over Jeff Bezos' prediction that cloud computing will replace physical machines – I spent my time diving into IRC (welcome to 1995) and deployed ZNC and The Lounge for a fully-functional bouncer/client deployment. And despite not being able to find active communities to participate in (IRC might actually be dead), I reveled in the process of researching options, deploying apps, troubleshooting errors, and finally making contact with what I'm sure was a server full of bots anyway.
So in an effort to celebrate what self-hosting is rather than what it isn't, below are some updates, launches, and recommendations focused entirely on self-hosted platforms in place of the usual smattering of related topics that most people will have forgotten by Monday:
- Nametag, a personal relationship manager for all the friends self-hosters are notorious for having, launched this past week and filled the void left in many of our lives by Monica (which reminds me – whatever happened to Chandler?)
- Calibre-Web Automated Downloader, a platform for downloading free (and definitely not pirated) books, has been rebranded to Shelfmark
- In their 2025 recap, the team behind qui – a sleek new qBittorrent frontend and multi-instance manager – announced they're working on an *arr replacement (quirr?)
- The developer of BentoPDF addressed a surge in similar projects utilizing its tools under the hood without proper attribution (the project also just hit 10k stars – in less than three months!)
- A wild Forecats appeared – a Home Assistant integration for generating themed pictures of cats representing the day's weather forecast (my favorite Reddit take from the launch post: this is the reason 2 sticks of ram cost as much as a used car)
- NocoDB (low-code database/spreadsheets) finally released dark mode...in a bug fix release?
- Youlag, a novel take on alternative YouTube frontends via FreshRSS plugins, has been making the rounds given a recent batch of updates (definitely worth checking out if you're a YouTube junkie)
- C.A.F.E., a visual automation builder/editor for Home Assistant, made me question why this functionality isn't already built in to the platform
- There's a new mobile music streaming client on the block for Jellyfin and Navidrome named Yuzic (spoiler alert: it's pretty)
- Mattermost recently imposed a 10,000-message limit (that may or may not be avoidable by switching to a different edition?), so someone developed a CLI tool to assist users with making the switch to Matrix
- A newsletter reader recently introduced me to an all-in-one Anytype deployment for self-hosters interested in the Notion-like platform but a bit intimidated by its official deployment process
Happy selfh.st/ing!
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Newswire
Jon Brodkin
Otto Kekäläinen
Miranda Bishop
Elena Rossini
Robert Olejnik
Sebastiaan Neuteboom
Chris Coplan
Content Spotlight
Meet Rackula, a web-based drag-and-drop server rack visualizer. With Rackula, users can easily build, plan, and visualize the layout of a physical server rack from the comfort of a browser. Features include various device types (server, networking, storage, power, KVM, AV, cooling, shelves), front/rear rack planning, various rack sizes, device images, and more.
Rackula can be easily deployed via Docker and doesn't require additional storage as configurations are saved via unique URLs and downloadable ZIP files.
Links: Source Code, Demo
Videos and Podcasts
- Koffan: Ultra-Lightweight Self-Hosted Shopping List App for Docker | DB Tech
- Best Self-Hosted Apps of 2025 | The Top New Containers You Should Know | Servers@Home
- The Scariest Thing in My Homelab Isn’t the Power Bill | SYNACK Time
- Joplin Notes: Open Source Notes Without Lock-In | Lawrence Systems
- Things I Stopped Self-Hosting (And Why Cloud Won in My Home Lab) | VirtualizationHowTo
- How to Install Karaoke Eternal on Unraid (Self-Hosted Karaoke) | AlienTech42
- 5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Self Hosting | Hardware Haven
Command Line Corner
Use diff -u file1 file2 to quickly compare differences between two files:
$ cat example.txt
self-
host
weekly
$ cat example2.txt
self
host
weekly
$ diff -u example.txt example2.txt
-self-
+self
host
weeklyClick here for an archive of commands shared in past newsletters.
Executive Sponsors
Thanks to following executive sponsors, whose continued support makes this newsletter possible:
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