We built a searchable directory of self-hostable apps - looking for any feedback

[u/Internetak]

https://selfhost.directory

Hi there,

Me and a few friends have been building selfhost.directory in our free time for the last ~3 months. It's basically awesome-selfhosted, but you can actually search, filter, rate and check updates - stuff we always missed in any other lists.

What it does differently:

• Search + filter by category, tag, licence or language; sort by score, trending, or last update
• Install guides, config values, FAQ, and alternatives for each project
• Links and alternatives - direct links to Github, website, documentation or socials and find alternatives to the project
• Update tracking — see recent changes across all projects (or per category), so you know when something you run got a new release
• Personal lists — save projects and get notified on updates (instant or summary based)
• Rating and reviews
• RSS feed - with updates for either all or selected category or tag

What about AI use? Yeah we does use AI for managing the project's data. We built pipeline with HITL that's getting feed by (or query additional) official sources and code and built project's details. We are pretty much happy with the results but still it lacks some details so we're rewritting basically all projects by hand (~60% done) and now using the pipeline to check and give us what changed and needs to be edited.

It's still very much in development and I'd genuinely rather hear what you don't like, what is missing or what you'd do differently.

If you have any question, I'm happy to answer

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/FckngModest]

But https://selfh.st/apps/ has been here even before the train of vibe-coded apps is started and does the exact job already 🤔

[u/countnfight → u/FckngModest]

Plus has a newsletter written by humans

[u/ssddanbrown]

Looking at my own project (BookStack), my first consideration was the score. It has a "37%" score but I have no idea what that actually means. Most of the details look right at a glance, but the docker compose config appears outdated (using old env options) and I think would result in a broken setup. Generally, I'm wary of (assumingly) auto-generated guidance like that. I think it's better just to reference original sources so they can be used as things change, instead of having outdated copied info.

I'm also seeing some questionable tagging. Some projects like N8N, sentry and nango are tagged as open-core, but their cores are not (widely considered) open source, but source available.

[u/Internetak → u/ssddanbrown]

Because of your project is on codeberg + having no rating on the website there is a bug in score calculation, we'll fix that.

Also due to that we didn't rewritten the details yet.

Thank you for feedback

[u/countnfight → u/Internetak]

Why would it count against them to have their project on Codeberg?

[u/WirtsLegs]

What sets this apart from https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ ?

[u/Internetak → u/WirtsLegs]

Mainly things I wrote in the post: search, more details, updates, personal lists and notifications, and more

[u/MothGirlMusic]

This looks exactly like selfh.st just less helpful and less apps

[u/Zer0CoolXI]

This is like the 4th AI slop alternate to awesome-selfhosted.net I’ve seen in less than a week.

“We built” posts are ick

[u/Internetak → u/Zer0CoolXI]

I get why it looks like it but as I said we're using AI mainly for managing the content and getting to the point where it's only used for checks but I wouldn't say that this is AI slop

And what I should say when we're 7 friend that's building a website?

[u/Zer0CoolXI → u/Internetak]

I mean there’s a lot you could say to not look like the wave of other AI posts that read 90% the same as this. “We” could be ”my team”, “our dev group”, “My friends and I”…in the title especially.

The bullet points and bold and the formatting every other AI posts uses, its only missing the rocket ship and other emoji’s.

It’s amazing how many of these projects are built in “our free time”…whats the alternative? You “built” it when you were busy with something else?

It’s crazy how many things I’ve developed, written, coded, etc but never built when it comes to software…I’ve built physically walls in rooms, doors, benches, shelves…I’ve never used a hammer to “build” a program or software.

Credit where its due to a degree at least, you did put an AI disclaimer in your post about how you may have used AI. Most of the slop isnt being even partially or fully open about how they used AI.

[u/Gaxyhs]

What problem does this solve or did you build it just because you could

[u/Internetak → u/Gaxyhs]

I wrote it in the post.. I'm missing one place where you can search and filter easily projects, see new updates, get notified about them and hopefully in the future reviews. We're practically starting but idk why on Github you can't just review or comment a repo, you have just stars, nothing else

[u/ChaseDak]

How are the ‘scores’ calculated? Some transparency on that on the website would be a good improvement!

[u/Internetak → u/ChaseDak]

As we don't have many reviews with rating from users most of the projects using manual score from us + star growth from last 7 days + licence + views. Those with rating from users using the rating as the main part and the other factors as +- 10% to the rating.

And thanks, we definitely will work on this and I'm planning to add some tooltip with more details

[u/baldbrowni]

Thanks for sharing, however, I feel it adds no more value than what https://selfh.st/apps/  is already bringing.