Mereo

Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.

This is no longer the case after the version 2.0 release. Version 2.0 is the stable release: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/22546

Public-facing services need at least a minimum level of security protection. All of my services are protected by the reverse proxy Caddy, and Crowdsec protects my system and services from malicious bots. My Flirt 2’s firewall bans all malicious bots that Crowdsec discovers.

Interesting:

The company blamed the expense of running the platform as a reason behind the decision, **but a shift to a more AI-focused business seems to be the real culprit. **
article: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/popular-tv-tracking-app-tv-time-is-shutting-down-as-company-focuses-on-ai/

Great advice.

Because you can buy something like this Sata drive enclosure: https://a.co/d/004sj6TS, and power it with a small ATX power supply.

You can power the drives using a standard PC power supply. You can also use a switch like this one to power them: https://ebay.io/m/jRSozI

Caddy runs on Windows so someone could use it for reverse proxy.

You definitely can if you put Immich behind a reverse proxy like Caddy and open it up to the rest of the world. I also protect my instance against bots with Crowdsec. That’s how share albums with family and friends.

I currently locally host the vault, but I’m realizing that this could cause problems for my family if something were to happen to me. While not technologically inept, if my server at home crashed they would have no idea how to access it, and they would lose all of the passwords.

This is why I refuse to host critical services for friends and family. Many of my friends and family use my Jellyfin server because if something happens to the TV shows and movies, it’s not a big deal. But passwords? No thank you.

Indeed, AI is a tool, and the human should be an expert who verify its work. What I don’t like are posts about apps that are completely vibe-coded without any thought put into them, which pose dangerous security risks.

I gave up on having a stable Nextcloud instance. I went with Hetzner instead and got Onlyoffice working with it: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

Self-hosting is a community effort in which the whole community helps each other to self-host their data, including programming the services people use for this purpose. The problem with closed-source software is that we don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, or if it’s indeed sending telemetry.

Even worse, if that service is ever no longer supported or updated, I’ll be left with data on my server that can’t be used to its full potential, and a service that won’t receive security updates.

Open-source software, on the other hand, is a community effort. If, for example, software is no longer updated or supported, it can easily be forked, and my data can be transferred to the new service.

Sigh… As always, life must be balanced. You can’t go from one extreme to the other. It’s a spectrum. I self-host what I deem important in order to keep it under my control and not on a capitalist platform.

It’s an adventure, each month, you learn more and realize that you can host more services yourself.

I selfhost because I want to be in control of my data and own it. Closed software is the antithesis of that. They’re just bots trying to advertise their software.

I had long covid for 3 years after that. But I’m feeling better nowadays, thanks.

Temporary becomes permanent. When I was experiencing severe long-term symptoms of Covid, I bought a refurbished computer to use as a NAS with Jellyfin, Sonarr, and indexers. I kept the installed Windows 10 because I simply did not have the energy to do more. Then, when I felt better, I told myself, “Let me add more services.”

Now, it’s a Frankenstein computer where Windows 10 acts as the hypervisor, running Caddy as my reverse proxy. Crowdsec protects my services, and my Flint 2’s firewall acts as the Crowdsec bouncer. A VirtualBox VM runs in Windows 10 and hosts most of my Docker containers. Stablebits DrivePool manages my drive pool.

I’ve been running this setup for over a year, and I haven’t had any issues. I know I should switch to Linux, but since it’s been working great and I’m busy, I’ve been procrastinating.

It seems watches like Garmin Watches are not affected by this:

Two things that aren’t changing: every Strava athlete can still access and download their data for free, at any time – and wearable and device integrations are not affected .