Self-Host Weekly (22 May 2026)

SPONSORED BY    Kasm Workspaces

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 you to check it out

Happy selfh.st/ing!

Newswire

New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

Hey everyone, Today we’re announcing an important pricing update. Starting July 1, 2026, the price of a new Lifetime Plex…

Plexmichelle

GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

GitHub has confirmed that roughly 3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension.

BleepingComputerSergiu Gatlan

Stop Using Pull Requests

Your team’s code review process is probably an expensive illusion of quality. Here’s what the evidence says, and what to do instead.

Andrea’s SubstackAndrea Laforgia

Research as an antidote to ‘software brain’

Discover how we use human-computer interaction research to help build smart homes that adapt to the people who use them, not the other way round.

Building the Open HomePaulus Schoutsen

Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die

How your dependencies became Bernies

Andrew NesbittAndrew Nesbitt

Home Assistant MCP Server: The Complete Guide

Control your Home Assistant with AI. Learn what the MCP Server does, how to install it, and what AI can actually do in your smart home setup.

SmartHomeScene.comSHS

Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0

You’ll be able to run this Linux distro on both Azure and your desktop using Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here’s what we know about it so far.

ZDNETSteven Vaughan-Nichols

Feedback

Content Spotlight

Meet TapMap, a lightweight platform for visualizing a machine's outbound internet connections on a map. With TapMap, users can easily view the various locations their device is connected to from a retro-styled interactive world map. Features include insights, daily activity reports, highlights (new apps, countries, and ports), and detailed activity logs with timelines.

TapMap can be easily deployed via Docker and runs as a single container with no additional dependencies.

Links: Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• 5 Homelab Mistakes I Made (So You Don't Have To) | Servers@Home
• Before You Upgrade to Unraid 7.3… Watch This First | AlienTech42
• I Built a 256GB Local AI Cluster to Test Local Models | Techno Tim
• Pi: Open-Source AI Agent Terminal Set-Up | Christian Lempa
• OPNsense Transparent Filtering Bridge | Home Network Guy
• The Matrix Spring Update 2026 | Matrix Community

Command Line Corner

Use > file.txt to flush the contents of a file from the command line (helpful for clearing old log files when troubleshooting via the CLI):

/$ cat example.txt
   Self-Host Weeklky
/$ > example.txt
/$ cat example.txt
/$

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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