This question has been answered. Please stop trying to repeat information that has already been said many times before. Everything in this thread is in good faith, I am here to learn, so I will make mistakes. Furthermore, if you want to contribute something new, please read the entire post to avoid misunderstanding the purpose of this post.
Selfhosting is useful when you either need a lot of storage or a lot of processing power. For example, Kiwix is useful to selfhost on a server because a lot of its content can take up terabytes of storage, which a phone may not have. LLMs are also useful to selfhost because they require a degree of processing power that, again, a phone may not have.
In both cases, there is also a need for perpetual access. If you simply hosted an LLM on your home computer, it wouldn’t be very useful to access from your phone since your computer won’t be running all the time. So, a separate always-on server is needed.
However, there are some selfhosted software that I don’t see a use for. For example, Immich. Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers. Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point. AI image tagging is also something that could be run on-device as well, since it’s mostly lightweight (iPhones are capable of it). Having a setup like that also comes with the benefit of automatic backups being completely optional, rather than required.
There’s no reasonable need for extra storage or extra processing power needed for that use case, from what I can tell. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually used Immich before, so this is speculation. I apologize if I’m missing something obvious) There’s a lot of other selfhosted tools like spotDL which have a selfhosted web UI, but no GUI that can be installed outside of a web browser.
I guess my question is why there are so many selfhosted tools that unnecessarily require being run on a separate device. I do understand the legitimate use cases some of them have, but others seem better off on-device airgapped. This especially became an issue trying to find a notes app for Android that requires no account and runs fully locally, or an RSS reader that loads from the device itself. I found Joplin and Feeder or Read You as the software for each of those. I don’t like “server-based” selfhosting for things that could be done from the device itself.
I’m sorry if this turned into a rant. If someone could help me understand, I would appreciate that very much.
Cheers!
Edit: The comparison here isn’t between selfhosting and using a cloud provider. The comparison here is between selfhosting on a server and running explicitly on-device (besides where extra storage or processing power is required)
Answer
So that nobody has to dig through the comments for answers, this is what I’ve learned: In the case of Immich, its purpose isn’t designed to be a photo gallery. It’s designed to be a more polished backup solution, designed explicitly for photos and not general files. While Nextcloud could be used to backup photos, it’s not as focused on photos as Immich, and so it isn’t as nice to use for that purpose. Immich also allows you to share photos with a link, rather than relying on a cloud provider to do that for you. There’s also another benefit to selfhosting that I hadn’t entirely realized, which is availability across devices. Some things like an eBook library may not take up much space, but it’s convenient to not have to sync manually (or automatically) across devices, and instead access it from a central server. That same logic is true for RSS readers as well, since it’s inconvenient to manually add and sync feeds across devices. Syncing across devices can be done with something like Syncthing in some cases, but not all, and so that’s where selfhosting can be useful.
I think the point with all of these is that they are “cloud”-based. Except instead of the cloud being someone else’s computer, it’s your own. Let’s take Immich, for example. Sure I could keep all my photos on my phone. But what if I lose or break my phone? What if I have an actual camera with an SD card and I want to offload those photos? Self-hosting lets me keep a backup. I can set up a server with redundant drives that itself backs up to a server in another location with its own separate drives. Thus, I have my own safe cloud storage.
Sure, and I agree backups are important. I still don’t like that Immich requires another server to function in the first place. It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting. I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so, that way if my phone is ever lost or stolen I still have a backup without the need for a server.
So the difference here is you are manually doing a thing for your backups. Using a self hosted server and something like immich will seamlessly do it for you. If you drop your phone in the toilet and it breaks, the photos you took since your last manual backup would be saved.
Immich isnt meant to be a photo gallery viewer primarily, it is meant to be a self hosted photo backup service to replace stuff like icloud or google photos. So yeah, dont recommend it as a gallery viewer, recommend it as a selfhosted image backuo service.
I self host a jellyfin service on my nas, and keep all my movies and shows on that nas. I wouldnt be able to fit all that stuff on my phone.
I worked in an office that was paying out the ass for google drive. Setting up a self hosted nextcloud was a great solution and saved them a bunch of money, and still worked as a hands off “cloud solution”
If you dont want to run a separate machine to self host some services thats fine, you dont need to do it. its not for everyone. But plenty of people have reasonable motives for doing it.
Is that automated? It sounds kind of tedious, and it would be easy to lose data if something goes wrong in between those few days.
Some of the motivation behind self hosting is that there is one source of truth that is easy to manage and make backups for (a server or servers). Android backups in particular are kind of notoriously fragile (especially if you’re avoiding Google services) so it’s simpler to have the data stored on a server. Then I can wipe or lose my phone with impunity without really worrying about losing data, because it’s handled elsewhere.
Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).
If I left the USB stick plugged in constantly, but then it wouldn’t be very useful I guess.
I’ve only recently started selfhosting on my own, so I am still quite new.
I’ll check it out, thank you!
You already have plenty of responses, but immich is not an gallery app. I’m in the process of migrating my photo libraries to immich and it’s 20+ years of memories. Some are originally taken by film camera and then scanned, others are old enough that camera phones just didn’t exist and we had “compact” digital cameras. Then there’s photos taken with DSLR and drone and obviously all of the devices have changed multiple times over the years, so relying on just a single device is just not going to work over time.
All of those require some other system to store, organize, back up and enjoy than the device itself. And, as I have family, storing them on just my desktop would mean that no one else around would have easy access to them. And with immich I can easily share photos around when I carry DSLR with me in a family gathering or whatever.
And then there’s the obvious matter of having enough storage. Even my desktop doesn’t have a spare terabyte right now to store everything, I need the hardware anyways, so it just makes sense to keep them separated from my workstation which I can now do whatever I want with without worrying I’d lose any of those precious memories. And for the server part, I’m having one around anyways for pihole, home assistant, nextcloud to store/back up other data and so on, so for me it’s the most convenient approach to run immich server on there too.
And for the backup side of things. I’ve tried manual backups with various stuff over the years. It’s just not going to work for me. I either forget or life gets in the way or something other happens and then I’m several days or weeks behind the ‘schedule’. With dedicated server I don’t have to do anything, everything is running automatically at the background while I’m sleeping or doing something else more interesting than copying over a bunch of files.