this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
541 points (97.7% liked)

Selfhosted

60542 readers
1266 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the link in Rule 8 for details.

  8. AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post. )

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rockstar1215@lemmy.world 28 points 7 months ago (4 children)

It’s funny how common this mindset is in the self-hosting community: “If I’m running it on my own hardware, the software should basically be free… maybe I’ll toss a tiny ‘tip’ if I feel generous.”

The logic seems to be that since there’s no ongoing server cost, the developer’s time, skill, and effort must somehow be worth nothing and that we should magically fund the entire project through some hypothetical cloud version that they themselves will never use.

It’s like showing up to a brewery with your own growler and expecting the beer to be free because you didn’t use their glass.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 6 points 7 months ago

Careful bro you're making it sound like exploitation has been normalized in the name of 'free software', but actually... Oh wait.

[–] TeddE@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

To be fair - this mindset is hardly exclusive to self-hosters. The dotcom era itself kicked off because it was easier to get advertisers to pay for server costs than users.

[–] ksh@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago

Exactly right.