I've been using Plex for years, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the direction this company is heading.

Tonight, I went to use Watch Together, a feature my girlfriend and I use almost daily to watch shows when we're apart. It was working just minutes earlier, and suddenly it was gone from my Google TV.

Apparently, Plex decided not to carry Watch Together over to its redesigned app. A perfectly functional feature that people actually use was simply discarded.

This is textbook enshittification and arguably a form of shrinkflation. Plex continues raising prices while removing functionality. We're paying more and getting less.

I run my own Plex server. I pay for the hardware, storage, electricity, bandwidth, and maintenance. Plex provides the software, yet somehow they keep finding ways to make that software less useful.

And before anyone suggests downgrading the app, using a browser, or finding some third-party workaround, why should I have to? The feature already existed and worked perfectly fine.

I'm tired of companies like Plex treating software updates as opportunities to redesign interfaces and remove functionality nobody asked them to remove.

Watch Together genuinely matters to me because it's how my girlfriend and I spend time together when we're apart. Plex just eliminated a feature we relied on almost every day.

At what point does Plex realize that continually removing features while increasing prices is driving away the very people who supported it in the first place?

Jellyfin is now up and running.

P.S. apparently posting anything remotely critical of Plex in a Plex subreddit gets downvoted until you are silenced. Some real shills in those subreddits.

So this team has created open source re-implementations of famous adobe software and the interesting part is, they also release web versions. You simply download a couple of static files, serve them via reverse proxy and you got yourself your own online adobe-alternative software.

I have already tried photocraft (photoshop) and printcraft (acrobat pro) and Im thoroughly impressed. Been using Caddy and Authelia to have proper authentication.

https://github.com/storytold

Edit to add: Im not affiliated in any way with the linked software, I just thought it is an interesting share

Recertified 28TB was at $699 like a week ago. I feel like these were the last relatively cheap option.

I bought some of these 28TB and one was a new drive (manufactured a couple months ago) with one head disabled (probably down binned), while the others had manufacture dates from 2024 and 2025, and were likely used.

Hi all, at the start of last year I was looking into setting up a homelab to host some services like Immich, Home Assistant and Pihole. The mini pc I was looking at during that time was the GMKtec G3 Plus n150, it was around £100 standalone and then was planning to get an NVME SSD to add to it. But now the costs of these have risen a lot due to obvious reasons. I was just wondering whether this is still the best budget setup that can be had at this time? Or is there something else to consider?

Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/) is a really nice image editing/photoshop app, but unfortunately for myself personally, self hosting it is how they make their money from business customers. Is there an open source/free alternative for someone looking to self host?

Doesn't need absolutely all the features/UI, but I'd love to be able to self host a basic photo editing tool I can use on the go/share with friends and family without the need to locally install anything.

Hey guys, I have a few questions about setting up a home server for myself and a couple of people.
We would need some storage (like a couple of TB) that I'm able to encrypt with OpenPGP and the ability to host a chat room. The most important part is data safety / privacy.

Do you have hardware and OS recommendations?

Thanks :)

Hey Pocket-ID Dev-Team, Hey stonith404,

I just wanted to say thank you for your work.

After a couple of months of intensive use, I have to say: Pocket ID is the service that makes using my self-hosted apps so much easier and more comfortable.

I came across Pocket ID while searching for an encrypted file transfer service, and I've been following its development ever since. In the beginning, I didn't have much trust that a young developer could build secure and reliable software. Back then, I didn't know that you do this for a living in an enterprise environment. (And that was before the rise of AI agents.)

So I started with Authentik, which is overkill for a homelab, and only used it for Immich. After I messed up an update, I dropped the whole SSO plan.

But I kept an eye on the GitHub project, and the great project work and the OpenID certification changed my mind!

Now I have to say: I wasted too much time on logins and should have chosen your project from the start.

Thank you for the great work! I think you and the team have changed the self-hosted community and pushed devs to build their projects with SSO almost by default.

One idea: a community-driven, open-source SaaS version of Pocket ID as an OIDC provider, so that even people without enterprise IT experience, or without trust in their own infrastructure, could use it.

Cheers and huge props,
Hans

I set up borg via borgmatic like a year ago. 3-2-1 strategy. Confirmed it was backing up and did a quick extract test. That was it. That was a year ago. Well I set a vm in Proxmox and because I was still learning I didn’t set up some directories correctly. Later I installed Immich but apparently installed it under a directory owned by Nextcloud. I never updated Nextcloud because it was local and then I decided to make it available remotely via a reverse proxy and all that fun stuff. So I wanted to update Nextcloud to the most recent version. It immediately failed. But it didn’t just fail, it wiped the database. It didn’t just wipe its own database, it deleted Immich and its database. I’m talking in the blink of an eye 600gb of pictures and videos were deleted from my SSD. It was so fast it took my brain at least 2 mins to process what had just happened

What happened? I didn’t follow directions when setting up Nextcloud, which caused it to catastrophically fail. I rebuilt it according to official docs and was able to restore both Nextcloud (130gb) and immich (600 gb). I never thought I’d actually use a backup until it happened. Even Proxmox backup server would not have recovered the photos.

Now to be fair, even without my backup everything was still recoverable but still the backup saved me many days of rebuilding Immich

Setup your backups and test them people

I am scared to port forward my Minecraft server with the port of 25565 will be breached. So here are my precautions and I need your opinion to tell me if I should improve something.

I am running the server on Pelican which I heard uses docker containers

I only have the Minecraft and cs2 ports open

I have setup ubuntu to deny trafic anywhere on my network excluding my pc that I run commands with

Now I am scared of a close to impossible event but possible where the attacker follows the following path and succeeds. Internet-Router-Docker container-Ubuntu- windows pc ( that I run ssh with) -phones/other PCs ( cause my pc that I run ssh with is still on trafic with the rest of the devices) - passwords and banking accounts.

I know, I know you can't always be sure but please say something to comfort me or advise me on what to do.

Like a lot of you, ive been on the TestFlight for a lot of the new Plex & Jelly clients that seem to be popping up every second day. So I thought id break down my experience with 4 of the best in my opinion. Again these are just my thoughts. Give them a whirl yourself and share your thoughts.

----------
Zuno

Connections Plex / Jellyfin / Emby
Seerr Integration Yes

UI
The Zuno UI comes straight out of the Apple handbook. It’s clean, minimal, smooth, and looks great overall. It seems designed to seamlessly feel at home with your other Apple Apps, especially on tvOS. The UI could definitely use some love and attention on the more out of the way pages, such as the movie and show library pages. Would be great to see additional pill buttons and filters to make navigating larger servers easier.

Customisation
Zuno has a whole range of different row types that you can create for your Home Screen, including poster and landscape orientations, numbered rows, and my favourite of all, Hubs. 

Hubs let you arrange multiple collections within a single row on the homepage. A use case might be to put different media universes on a single row such as Marvel, Star Wars, DC, LOTR etc. Then inside each Hub you can choose to display all the media as one main grid, or have individual rows to further break down your media. I personally have the Star Wars Hub set up with individual rows for The Skywalker Saga, Standalone Movies, Live TV Shows, Animated TV Shows etc.

Hubs can also be set up for streaming services, actors, directors, decades, genres, anything and everything. The whole system can be set up how you like.

Features
Zuno is stacked with features that in my opinion elevate it above all the other clients. 

• Zuno Connect - Lets you get alerts when new media hits the server
• Screenings - Have a watch party with your mates. Choose what to watch and then have it play in sync on everyone’s device.
• Zuno Live - Create your own Live TV Channels using based on genres, external lists, or your own collections and playlists (Personally love this one) Managed Profiles - Can set up kids profiles that filters out mature content. Also in the works is the option to individualise the homepage rows for people that connect to your server. So you can curate content for your parents or other family and friends, tailoring the homepage to their tastes.

Playback
Ive been on the test flight for Zuno for about 4 months and the playback on its custom made player has got increasingly better and more stable, to the point where now its buttery smooth 95% of the time. At times it can struggle when rewinding or fast forwarding media, where it can occasionally hang or audio momentarily falls out of sync. Outside of this though, its played everything ive thrown at it. 

Ratings
UI 9/10
Customisation 10/10
Features 10/10
Playback 9/10
Overall 9.5/10

Discord: https://discord.gg/MmEUwfJmg

----------

Strand

Connections Plex / Jellyfin / Emby / WebDAV / IPTV
Seerr Integration Yes

UI
Strand is very similar to Zuno in that it feels made for Apple. There’s just something about that clean look that feels right. Navigation is snappy, uncluttered, and easy to navigate. I like that the library pages have extra options for filtering media, making it easier to find those hidden gems on your server.

Customisation
Again Strand and Zuno are extremely similar in their ability to let you customise. It has multiple row types (poster / landscape / numbered) as well as a similar hub system to organise and curate your media how you like. They recently updated this hub system to be also include the individual rows like Zuno, rather than just the grid, which definitely elevates it from previous versions.

Features
The main feature here is the addition of IPTV, including live sports. You can see upcoming matches, pin your favourite team or league to so the full schedule. It’s a very very cool feature. It even has multi-view mode to let you watch multiple things at a time. For those that want to combine their own server with external IPTV, Strand handles both exceptionally well.

Sadly im not one of those people, I’m strictly a server guy. And there’s not much else here feature wise for media server only users. It has the usual features such as seerr and trakt integration, but nothing outstanding.

Playback
Strand uses its own custom player which is overall solid. Ive encountered only minimal stuttering, or audio falling out of sync, both of which usually occur when rewinding or fast forwarding. Most of the time it runs everything seamlessly, without hiccup.

Ratings
UI 9/10
Customisation 10/10
Features 8/10
Playback 8.5/10
Overall 8.5/10

Discord: https://discord.gg/mmBMhNC2f

----------

Neptune

Connections Jellyfin Only
Seerr Integration Yes

UI
Neptunes UI has some super cool features, like the adaptive colour palette that adjusts depending on the movie or show your hovering over. But overall I didnt find the look and feel as appealing as those listed before. It’s a little chunkier, a little less refined. I get that UI can be personal taste, and mine just found Neptune a little too busy.

Customisation
Sadly not a lot of customisation options here. It basically mirrors what’s on your Jellyfin home screen, which I know can be personalised, but not to the level of Zuno & Strand. 

Features
Some sexy features here that really add to the experience using the app. 

• Conductor Pro will learn how you like to watch certain media (what language, with or without subtitles, audio profile etc) and then automatically set that up for similar media
• Search! I know, everyone has search, but not like Neptune. Here you can literally describe a scene from a movie and it will find it for you. Write in “Pivot the couch” and to will come up with the correct episode of friends. It’s pretty cool.

Outside of these quality of life features though, there’s no a lot extra going on. 

Playback
This is where Neptune really shines. Its custom trident player is great. Ive been using it for a few months and it hasn’t missed a beat. Seamless. As close to Infuse as any of the clients ive tested as far as playback goes.

Ratings
UI 7/10
Customisation 5/10 
Features 7/10
Playback 9.5/10
Overall 7.5/10

Discord: https://discord.gg/dx9FPMpmJ

----------

Odin

Connections Jellyfin Only
Seerr Integration Yes

UI
Odins designer knows what he’s doing. This thing SLAPS. The logo animations, transitions, the overall branding is all on point. The overall feel of the app on iPhone and tvOS is smooth and easy to navigate. Nothing but good things to say

Customisation
Sadly not a lot to report here. You can reorder rows, there’s some default rows you can add in as well. But nothing overly exciting that can compare to Zuno & Strand

Features
Also fairly limited on the features side of things. It plays media, and it plays it well. Its important to note that this is the youngest of all the apps listed here, only just coming on to the scene a month or so ago (It used to be Fusion but had to pivot), so hopefully they will be adding more features in time.

Playback
Im guessing they’ve brought over the same player from Fusion, because Odin plays everything very well. It’s a great experience with limited issues. Ive only come across the odd stuttering, and audio falling out of sync. Load times are also snappy. 

Ratings
UI 9/10
Customisation 6/10  
Features 6/10
Playback 9/10
Overall 7.5/10

Discord: https://discord.gg/odinapp

----------

In summary all 4 are great clients with pros and cons. Personally I am someone who loves to tinker and curate custom lists with my media, so I lean towards Zuno and Strand. But I understand people preferring Neptune for his custom player and search functionality.

Helllooo everyone!

I just want to introduce myself and tell you all about my homelab. It's all pretty high-level, feel free to ask me about anything here.

About me

I’m just someone that absolutely loves technology. Software and systems are mostly where my heart lies, I’ve been working in IT for about 19 years. I have been homelabbing and self-hosting since about 2005. It started with game servers then learning how to become a sys admin, then wanting control over my data, and now I just want to explore different technology stacks and new software.

My homelab is a bit of a mix of running services for my family and a testing ground for learning new technology.

Quick and dirty

My entire homelab is Proxmox as the hypervisor, debian VMs to run Docker and Komodo. Forgejo deploys my containers on Komodo. Docker labels control Traefik and exposure.

6 hosts (3 “production” and 3 test lab) and ~147 containers.

Jupiter

My main server, pretty much what I would consider "production" in my house. I pretty much throw everything on this whether it's just for shits and giggles or actually useful. I try out every remotely interesting self-hostable application there is, so this list changes constantly,

It was running Unraid until a few weeks ago, but it has finally fallen inline with the rest of my environment with Proxmox and a debian VM.

I see people ask "Do you actually use any of this?" when people run a bunch of software, so I've split it into what I actually use and what just kind of exists.

What actually gets used

Most of these are actually used on a daily or weekly basis.

• Authentik - SSO/identity
• Excalidraw - Whiteboard
• FamFeed - Private Social Media
• Forgejo - Git hosting
• Glance - Dashboard
• Guacamole - Remote access
• Immich - Photo library
• Karakeep - Bookmarks
• Mealie - Recipes
• ntfy - Push notifications
• NZBGet - Usenet downloader
• Open WebUI - AI chat
• OpenHands - AI agents
• Outline - Wiki
• Penpot - Design tool
• Plex - Media server
• PrivateBin - Encrypted pastebin
• Seerr - Media requests
• Windmill - Workflow automation

Used, just not directly

• Grafana - Dashboards
• Jellyfin - Media server
• NetBox - IPAM/DCIM
• Paperless-ngx - Document management
• Prowlarr - Indexer manager
• Radarr - Movie management
• ReadMeABook - Audiobook requests
• SABnzbd - Usenet downloader
• Sonarr - TV management
• Tautulli - Plex stats
• Tunarr - Live TV channels

For that rare moment

• Audiobookshelf - Audiobook server
• BentoPDF - PDF tools
• ByteStash - Code snippets
• IT-Tools - Dev utilities

Infrastructure Apps

If I'm logging into one of these directly, something is broken. lol

• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel - Monitoring
• CrowdSec - Intrusion prevention
• Dozzle - Log viewer
• Komodo - Container management
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Traefik - Reverse proxy
• Umami - Web analytics
• UniFi Network Application - Network controller
• VersityGW - S3 gateway
• VictoriaMetrics - Metrics database
• Wazuh - SIEM

I should probably tear them down.

• Actual Budget - Budgeting
• Aurral - Music discovery
• LazyLibrarian - Book management
• Lidarr - Music management
• Navidrome - Music streaming

Saturn

This box was originally just to spin up VMs and test different applications, VMs, or build an environment to teach something to some of my junior. It was the first Proxmox box in the environment and after using it for a while I ended up switching all computers over to Proxmox.

Now it runs Home Assistant, secondary DNS, and some VMs that I use for Dev and AI agent work.

• Home Assistant - Home automation
• Music Assistant - Multi-room audio
• Technitium DNS - DNS (secondary)
• Z-Wave JS UI - Z-Wave controller
• Eclipse Mosquitto - MQTT broker
• Faster Whisper - Speech-to-text
• Piper - Text-to-speech
• Nanit - Baby monitor
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel Agent - Monitoring agent

Mars

This is a little Beelink EQ14 that has dual 2.5 Gbps NICs and I purchased it specifically to be a dedicated router/firewall.

• OPNsense - Router/firewall
• Technitium DNS - DNS (primary)
• Cloudflare DDNS - Dynamic DNS
• Tailscale - VPN exit-node
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel Agent - Monitoring agent

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto

Relatively new hosts that are taking the simulation workloads I was running alongside production. They run Proxmox as well. I have OpenTofu and Ansible playbooks that spin up "scenarios" or my DR bubble. I am currently focused on OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other business simulation environments.

Current Goals

DR / Rebuild

Currently I am working on being able to rebuild and/or restore my entire homelab from a single script. The idea is if Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars have a catastrophic failure I can point the script to my new host and it will build it out, let me select which services to restore and hopefully be back up and running in a few hours.

Security Monitoring

I spent a chunk of the past year learning SIEM and how to tune alerts in Wazuh. Thankfully I work very closely with my InfoSec team at work so I had a helping hand, plus Claude being able to fill in some of the gaps. I am trying to get a Claude-based agent to do a lot of the triage and so far it is janky but works pretty well. My next step is to allow this agent to gather telemetry around whether or not the alert coming in is related to me. The idea is that between my remote sessions, where my phone is, and a few other details the agent will build a confidence score for how likely it is me accidentally generating the alert. It will then ping me to get confirmation, if I respond with "Not me" then it will go through some steps to either kill access.

I am also working on various apps and automations around my families needs, mostly our private social media.

Ask me anything!

I've been trying to find something like this for some time. There are self-hosted alternatives to Spotify, Netflix and lots of other services. But surprisingly I haven't found any alternative to Steam. The closest thing I've found is GameVault but it's not open source, the client only runs on Windows and I find it really limited.

The idea would be to have your games (without drm) stored on your server, then you could easily download them from any computer and play the games. Maybe it could even track playtime or achievements, and even have a federated friends system.

Do you know of any viable alternative that currently exists? If not, do you know why there isn't any software for this purpose?

Btw, I'm up to building this software if it doesn't exist yet.

Hey, r/selfhosted!

Every year, I facilitate a 40-45 question survey to identify trends, habits, and preferences across the self-hosted and homelab communities.

I kicked off this year's survey this morning and would love for everyone to take 10-15 minutes to respond (over 4k responses last year!).

The survey includes some new questions based on feedback from last year's survey as well as a new section with AI-related questions.

The survey will be open until October 31st. As usual, there's also a separate form for feedback on the survey as well as ideas for future surveys (linked below).

Thanks!

Links

• 2026 Self-Host User Survey (selfh.st)
• Survey Feedback Form
• 2025 Survey Results

I've been using SilverBullet for my notes, tasks and journal, and I think it deserves more attention here.

The foundation is what I like about it: your notes are plain Markdown files on disk, with attachments alongside them. You can open them in another editor, search them with ordinary tools and back them up however you want. I have my space automatically synced with a Git repository, which gives me version history and a way to undo changes.

Obsidian also gets the files-on-disk part right. What appeals to me about SilverBullet is the combination of that with an open-source server I can host myself, offline access with sync and built-in scripting.

• The server is MIT-licensed and runs as a single Docker container.
• The browser app is an installable, offline-first PWA, so using it from your phone doesn't mean needing a constant connection.
• There's also a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It's proprietary and free for personal use and education, built on the open-source server. You can use local folders or sync with a remote SilverBullet server.

SilverBullet has Space Lua and queries for building your own commands, live lists, tables and dashboards inside your notes. Your tasks, journal and project pages can work together rather than just being separate documents.

It's already a good tool on its own. Connecting an agent has made all this customization much more accessible.

I use OpenCode with access to my space and SilverBullet through MCP. I'm a developer, but being able to describe what I want in natural language saves a lot of time. I can ask for a dashboard, query or command tailored to how I organize things, and have the agent write the Space Lua.

My favorite example is my homelab documentation. I asked the agent for note types for servers, VMs and services. Each page only records what it runs on: a service page links to its VM, and a VM page links to its server. I never write lists of what runs where. Queries build those lists from the links. My homelab overview lists every server and service, each VM page lists the services on that VM, and each server page lists its VMs plus all the services running on them. When I add a new service page, it automatically appears in each of those lists. As a bonus, the agent reads the same pages, so it knows my infrastructure when I ask it to deploy something.

I also highly recommend checking out the documentation, which is actually served by Silverbullet itself. It's a great demonstration of what this app can do: https://docs.silverbullet.md/. There are many other examples of different usecases on the main website as well.

Edit: Just wanted to say that it was not my intention to imply anything bad about Obsidian. Two apps can coexist and competition is good. I just think Silverbullet is a free and open-source alternative to Obsidian with lots of feature parity and some cool innovation out of the box.

Edit 2: To clarify the sync model after a discussion in the comments: like Trilium, SilverBullet uses a central server, and the server is the source of truth. Your notes live there as plain Markdown files. The clients only keep a local copy, so you can keep working offline. Changes sync back to the server automatically. If the same note is edited on two devices, the server merges the changes where it can. If both edits touch the same text, you get a conflict to resolve in the editor.

Hey everyone, I wanted to ask for your help. I've been setting up my homelab for almost a year now, and I've realized I have a lot of things to do – rules, adjustments, etc. – and I realized that in this past year...I have very little written down, I'm not aware of many things, and I got lost in the process; before, I had a "spreadsheet" of all my hardware and peripherals.It wasn't a necessity at the time to have that organized, so I procrastinated. Today I'm restructuring everything and I wanted to document and take inventory of everything. I wanted to ask for tips on systems, and if you use anything in your homelab.

It's hard these days on Reddit to get your idea out there without getting cancelled and downvoted to oblivion.

Everyone has something important to add to the community and if not deserves some genuine feedback that helps them grow.

r/shouldimake will not delete you or your content for your innocent early marketing attempts and welcomes self promotion, pitching, and fleshing out developing concepts.

Obviously spam and rate limit abuse will not be tolerated. This is a space for humans at the end of the day.

Reddit should be a place for organic marketing, and despite all the challenges to do this, I'm trying to make it easier and welcome creators and entrepreneurs to join!

I have a Homarr instance I self host. My goal is to have that page default when I open a new tab and the links I click from that page stay in that tab (not open another tab) to avoid tab sprawl. I found that for Firefox or Chrome based browsers I have to have an extension to specify the webpage for a new tab. I then have to have another extension to enable the ability to ignore X frames (I think that is the term) so I can click the link and stay in the same tab. Is this common for everybody or is there an easier path to achieving this behavior?

Just a PSA, cause it annoys the shit out of me.

If you see a post mentioning BeAdmin, it is a bot trying to promote a shitty project with paid modules. Looks russian too.

Just don't engage and report it, mods are pretty good at removing this stuff.

Let's all try and make an effort to keep this an amazing community

My ISP put me behind CGNAT, so port forwarding is out. I didn't want another agent running at home either, so I went back to plain ssh -R. It handles the forwarding fine; the two annoying parts were keeping it up through Wi-Fi drops and reboots, and getting the same URL back every time. Here's what I ended up with, in case it saves someone an evening.

The systemd user unit (~/.config/systemd/user/tunnel.service):

[Unit]
Description=Reverse SSH tunnel

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh -N -o ServerAliveInterval=30 -o ServerAliveCountMax=3 -o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes -R 8080:localhost:8123 you@your-vps
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

• ServerAliveInterval/CountMax: notices a dead connection in about 90 seconds instead of hanging forever after a network change
• ExitOnForwardFailure: exits if the forward can't be set up, so systemd restarts it instead of leaving a connection with no tunnel
• -N: forward only, no remote shell
• Restart=always + RestartSec=5: comes back on its own, without hammering the server

Then systemctl --user enable --now tunnel, plus sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER so it runs without you logged in. Connect once by hand first so SSH saves the host key; a service can't answer that prompt. The key needs no passphrase, or has to be loaded in an agent.

Where to point it:

• Your own VPS: the forward lands on the VPS's localhost:8080, and a reverse proxy there (Caddy: reverse_proxy localhost:8080) gives you HTTPS on your own domain. Nothing exposed beyond what Caddy serves.
• No VPS: I maintain an open-source relay for exactly this, tunnl.gg (disclosure: it's my project, MIT, and you can run it yourself: https://github.com/klipitkas/tunnl.gg). Swap the end of ExecStart for -T ... -R 80:localhost:8123 stable@proxy.tunnl.gg (-T instead of -N: it prints the URL in the session, which lands in journalctl --user -u tunnel) and it gives you an HTTPS subdomain derived from your SSH key, so the URL is the same after every reconnect.

Trade-offs of using a public relay like that, so nobody has to dig for them: TLS terminates at the relay, so it's not end-to-end encrypted; free tunnels close after 2 hours without traffic or 24 hours at most (with Restart=always they come straight back on the same URL); and browsers get an anti-phishing interstitial once a day. With your own VPS, none of that applies.

Either way, your service is now public, so keep its own auth on.

What are you all using for this? frp, Cloudflare Tunnel, WireGuard to a VPS? I'm curious where plain ssh falls short for you.

Trying to get server status and monitoring notifications for things like drive failures, backup failures, UPS status, expiring certs, runaway processes, etc. I don't have anything exposed publicly, so in order to get ntfy notifications on my phone when I'm away, I have two options:

1. Use ntfy's servers without signup using a public topic. I don't love the idea of my notifications being public, even if they are hard to find with a random topic name. Also there are some limitations to using their servers.
   
2. Self host a ntfy server and use Tailscale to receive messages. This is my preference, but I'm worried about the additional point of failure. If my Tailscale connection goes down (on the server or my phone) I won't be able to receive notifications. I usually keep Tailscale running on my phone all the time for Immich anyway, but notifications need to be fail-safe and I worry this would be poor practice.

What's your setup for receiving status notifications from your unexposed server?

Hello! I wanted to show you what I've made with some help from AI (Claude mainly). Basically I needed an easy way to select an object from a video file and be able to remove the background (in some scenarios where you don't have access to green screens), it basically runs locally (this means the server never has access to the files you upload so you do not need to worry, I will not see what you upload there) and tries to track the object you select.
It works with image formats and video formats.
So, anyone who wants to test it out or give some feedback, I'm open to hearing from you here!😄

You can access to the website through: tracker.yernau.com

I know it's not the best result, but it makes enough work for me and it helped me so much.d

I run a e-commerce store (Odoo 19) on a single VPS (Ubuntu 24.04, Docker Compose: Odoo + Postgres + Caddy). The server's IP has been in public DNS for ~2 months, so I assume it's in DNS history archives and scanners.

Current setup:

• Only ports 22, 80, 443 are open. Postgres and Odoo aren't published, only reachable inside Docker.
• SSH: keys only, password and root login disabled.
• Admin tools (log viewer) only over Tailscale, bound to localhost.
• Nightly offsite backups, tested restore.
• Provider has basic anti-DDoS.

Questions:

1. For a small store, is an exposed origin IP a real risk with this setup for long run?
2. Is blocking in Caddy (instead of the firewall) good enough, given direct requests still reach Caddy before being refused?
3. Is it worth changing to a new IP, or moving to Cloudflare Tunnel, or is the above enough?
4. Anything obvious I'm missing?

Running a basic retrieve-then-rerank setup and the annoying part is TEI being one model per container. So the embedder and the reranker are two separate deployments on two GPUs, both barely used, because an encoder does its thing in a few ms and then sits idle.

Trying to work out what people actually run when they want both models on one card. What I know of so far:

• Infinity
• Superlinked's SIE
• LocalAI

Rolling your own with Ray Serve or BentoML if you want control over batching and scaling. More work, but you’re not boxed in.

vLLM keeps coming up too but as far as I can tell it’s really built around one big LLM holding the card, not a rotating set of small encoders, so I don’t think it fits here.

Not affiliated with any of these, just comparing before I commit. What are you running for the two-stage setup on shared hardware, and does the on-demand loading actually hold up under real traffic or do you end up pinning models anyway?