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!
To answer your question, most people don’t have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?
Music for example. If I don’t want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.
If I don’t listen to music at home, then you’re right, there’s no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.