Self-Host Weekly (15 May 2026)

SPONSORED BY    PikaPods

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

Happy selfh.st/ing!

Newswire

Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

Streaming your own media shouldn’t come with a subscription. Here’s why Plex users are frustrated — and why Jellyfin might be a better bet.

Android AuthorityRobert Triggs

If you downloaded this popular software recently, you might have installed malware

Just a month after hackers used the CPU-Z website to spread malware, another popular app’s website has been breached and turned into a malware distribution channel.

NeowinDavid Uzondu

GitLab Act 2

A letter to our customers and our investors.

GitLabBill Staples

The AI Hard Drive Shortage Is Making It More Expensive and Harder to Archive the Internet

The Internet Archive, Wikimedia, academics, and hobby archivists are having trouble finding hard drives or are having to pay extremely high prices for them.

404 MediaJason Koebler

Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

Last year I said I’d probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again. I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu’s.

Jeff Geerling

Homebridge 2.0 is here, and it speaks Matter

Homebridge continues to Matter

The VergeJennifer Pattison Tuohy

Why I Don’t Vibe Code

A “brief” accounting of various reasons why vibe coding has just never clicked for me personally as a developer.

jacobharr.is

Feedback

Content Spotlight

Meet SnapOtter, a self-hosted image manipulation platform. The photo-equivalent to in-browser PDF editing platforms like Stirling PDF and BentoPDF, SnapOtter provides provides a web-based interface for editing and transforming photos. Features include 50+ manipulation tools, local AI capabilities (background removal, upscaling, colorizing), pipelines, and a REST API.

SnapOtter can be easily deployed via Docker and optionally supports NVIDIA GPU acceleration for certain tool usage.

Links: Website, Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• The Supply Chain Attacks All Have One Thing in Common. It's GitHub. | DB Tech
• Stop Putting Everything in Discord & Reddit: Use Forums Instead | Lawrence Systems
• New Self-Hosted Apps You NEED to Try [April 2026] | Servers@Home
• Everything New In Home Assistant 2026.5! | Everything Smart Home
• Is Proxmox SDN Actually Worth It for a Home Lab? | VirtualizationHowTo
• Dockhand: A Smarter, Safer Docker Manager | Christian Lempa

Command Line Corner

Use !$ as a shortcut to reuse or repeat the argument used in the most recent command. For instance, it can be used to easily navigate to a folder path that was recently created or modified.

/$ mkdir /self/host/weekly
/$ cd !$
    cd /self/host/weekly
/self/host/weekly$ 

Executive Sponsors

Thanks to following executive sponsors, whose continued support makes this newsletter possible:

• 1Panel – Modern, open source VPS control panel
• AFFiNE – Privacy-first knowledge base
• Atria – Event management and networking platform
• Faved – Open source bookmark and link manager
• Postiz – Agentic social media scheduling
• Servers@Home – Homelab resources and community
• tirreno – Open source security framework
• Uncloud – Deploy and scale containerized apps across servers

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