I’m a big fan of self-hosting services, but I figured that not all of them are me, especially when it comes to privacy. So, I had to reevaluate my approach to self-hosting.
Email is a complete no-go for me. While it’s possible to self-host email, it’s simply not practical for my current needs. Instead, I prefer to pay for someone else to manage and maintain the service, ensuring its reliability. Currently, I use a combination of Fastmail, iCloud Mail, a managed email service, and ProtonMail. I remind myself that email is an outdated technology that should be treated like a postcard.
For files, I use different end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) services. I’ve enabled Advanced Data Protection (ADP) on my iCloud, which provides E2EE protection for all my documents. Additionally, I use Cryptomator and [rclone.org](http://rclone.org) to encrypt files stored on Google Workspace (provided by my workplace). I also have Koofr Vault and Internxt, and can’t forget the small ProtonDrive space I have. I think I’m pretty much covered. These online services, along with my local file server that hosts my backups, provide me with the peace of mind I need.
Videos are stored on iCloud with end-to-end encryption, but I also have some videos that I self-host on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Jellyfin. These are mostly videos I downloaded from YouTube using yt-dlp. By having them on a local media server, I can watch them on any device at home, including AppleTV, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Linux. This self-hosted service actually saves me a lot of bandwidth because it’s a one-download, play-multiple times approach.
Recently, I had an idea to do the same with photos. Photos are primarily stored on iCloud (again with ADP) and backed up locally on a networked portable external drive. However, organizing them is a different challenge. My issue is that photos are scattered across different devices (each iPhone model has its own separate subdirectory), which also leads to duplicates (waste of space, right?). Photos that I share are on [Flickr.com](http://Flickr.com), so there’s no problem there. However, the challenge lies in organizing and archiving the photos for long-term storage.
I believed Photoprism would be the solution. I have a spare Raspberry Pi 4 with a 512GB SSD, which I thought would be a great starting point. I downloaded the Photoprism Raspberry Pi image and attempted to run it. It functioned perfectly except for an issue cloning it to the SSD, the clone failed to boot. This caused a setback.
Next, I attempted a fresh installation of Raspberry Pi OS and downloaded the Photoprism Docker image. I successfully cloned this image from the SD card to the SSD, and it worked! Now, we’re making progress! I uploaded several test images. The Raspberry Pi began processing them. However, it was extremely slow, like molasses. I left it overnight with 80 images to see if it would optimize and improve its performance, but unfortunately, it remained slow.
Disappointed, I decided to nuke it because the experience was not pleasant. I realized that I needed an AMD (OK, or Intel, too)-based computer to run it, despite the website stating that running it on Raspberry Pi 4 had performed well for some users (though not for me, definitely). I checked out Ente, but their architecture would be wasted when self-hosted - their 3-server data protection would not be fully optimized.
So, photo storage remains a bit of a challenge for me, except for backing up and archiving. There are other free, open-source software options that might appear to work, but none are as polished as Photoprism, in my opinion.
Regarding my social media posts, I subscribe to Micro.blog (for microblogging) and it’s backed up to a managed WordPress blog. I also use omg.lol service, which provides Mastodon-based social.lol. I used to host the BlueSky PDS for my own posts, but I decided to wait for a more advanced PDS with better management features.
Not everyone wants self-hosting, and not everything is suitable for self-hosting. Choose which services you want to self-host (and remember, if you run your own server at home, you’ll also have to factor in the cost of electricity, bandwidth, and time for management). Personally, I don’t plan on self-hosting for all the services I use, so I pick my battles.