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:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
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.
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!
I'm generally anti-ai but this is kind of exactly what vibe coding is for.
Someone has a problem right now and there is no tool to fix their problem how they want it fixed, so they throw some shit together for personal use and maybe someone else can use it if they want idgaf.
Why would they maintain that? It does what they need it to, when they need it. Usually these tools are very basic.
I don't disagree necessarily, but they shouldn't be uploading / sharing one-off projects they don't intent to maintain.
That is a bit of an open source philosophy difference.
Is it better that everyone has open source everything so that anyone who finds the one-off useful can benefit from it?
Or is the software actually not provided "as-is" like the license states and on releasing open source software the community deserves regular updates?
I think that second option is a very entitled path. We are not entitled to the continued used free labor of a random person on the internet.
Yes, but there's a difference between having your source and binaries available on github and submitting to an app store like flathub.
That's true to an extent, but I'd disagree wrt something like dockerhub.
I don't really agree. If you have a tool to do a thing, share it in case someone else could benefit, just be open about what it is.
A solid 40% of projects get abandoned, that its about double for purely vibecoded is unsurprising. Purely generated is completely unmaintainable. At least they realized it within 6 months I suppose.
As always the social infrastructure (community, user base) is much more important for the success and use value of a piece of software than the exact technology used to make it (lang, framework, helper tools).
The pre-LLM-effort-was-a-filter argument holds up, but I think what effort was really filtering for was why someone built the thing. High effort filtered out "this seemed fun for a weekend" projects. LLMs just surfaced that those were always the majority.
The better filter is: does this project serve a specific audience that genuinely needs it, or is it a demo of what you can do with Claude?
What I look for now:
Specific problem for a specific group of people (not "general-purpose LLM wrapper")
Open core (MIT or something that lets the community carry it if the author walks)
Revenue model or institutional backing (someone has to keep the lights on)
Evidence the author understands what they shipped, not just LLM output committed wholesale
We build CircuitForge, self-hosted tools for navigating opaque systems (job markets, government benefits, insurance). The architecture is deterministic-first: eligibility checks, validation, and data pipelines are rule-based and grounded in structured data, so the LLM is drafting from a clean, repeatable foundation rather than hallucinating into a void. That also means we can run smaller, specifically fine-tuned models instead of throwing a frontier model at everything and hoping for the best. Smaller models run on consumer hardware, which cuts hosting cost and shrinks the privacy risk surface significantly. Humans approve before anything acts. Pipeline layer is MIT and lives on Forgejo. There's a full devops stack, a real business model, and I use these tools every day. We're also actively collaborating with other devs and always looking for contributors.
The people using these tools actually need them. That's the commitment signal that doesn't evaporate when the novelty wears off.
Dammit...did you have to pivot this into a pitch?
Unfortunately, yeah. I'm still in the "I have a cool thing that actually is cool but buried under slop" phase, so getting literally any attention is helpful. I hate it, but if I want to make these tools, I have to get my hands a little corpo 🤮
I would say that the free tiers of those coding tools got cut back so much, that some of those slop coded stuff wouldn't keep doing it any more.
Claude is on a 5 hr timer, and you get very few responses. Qeen Code was free for a second, that was nice.
Speaking from my own slop coded project viewpoint.
I expect this gap will be filled by cheaper models like GLM as they catch up to frontier models in their capabilities.
I believe they will catch up in no time.
But not every one will be able to pay anything for them.
I'm not paying because it is a hobby project (a huge one) and it is totally free with optional donations. That's not much ROI.
Yeah, but OTOH, do we cheer for centralisation of technology for thems that can affords to pay?
Locally run models are available for free. My laptop can run a tiny model 1.8b, so it's useless, and the family gaming pc could use some smaller side medium ones like 8-10b ones.
Right now the bubble is still insane, but I believe the it population will able to afford better chips in couple of years.
Maybe but right now, according to the Steam hardware survey, the most commonly owned VRAM tier is 8GB - sitting at around 27% of surveyed systems, with 16GB closing the gap fast.
Even with MoE and llama.cpp tricks, you're not running frontier anything at decent context length without significant fiddling on that - it's possible on 8GB but you're operating with almost no headroom, 16GB might let you scrape by with a Q4 quant MoE.
The very best local coding models (arguably the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B MoE or Qwen 3.6-27B) need 16-17GB at Q4 quantisation, and building a system from scratch to run one is probably a $3.5K proposition. With the cost of living crisis hitting everywhere, that means the table ante gear is beyond the reach of many. Even a decent GPU is north of $1K in many local markets.
I adore small LLMs, and know a lot of tricks to leverage them, but 14B is the bare minimum for what I would start to consider competent.
We're boned until 2030ish, when gear gets cheaper (allegedly).
Part of me thinks there's a dark conspiracy at play here. Give people affordable access to frontier LLMs, make self hosting hardware cost prohibitive, then jack up subscription prices.
I think there's a way out of that mess, but it needs people to stop chasing "bigger, better" and start chasing "actually, how can I use what I have to do X instead of needing bigger and better?" but that needs talented devs and a mind shift.
ICBW and YMMV.
2030 is only a couple years away ;).
IMHO, $4-5k for a computer that can code as much you want is a bargain. If you have a product that will sell.
Conspiracy is right, the bubble is real and they will keep it pumping til it burst. Llms are not the second coming. They are great tools, but they are not solution for everything.
This economical milestone will be really "interesting" in the next 10 years. Interesting as the Chinese curse for wishing you interesting life.
That assumes prices actually come down.
On purely dollar costs, $5K for a coding / AI only PC doesn't amortise vs subscription or API access. Not for occasional shenanigans anyways.
I've done the calcs, because I wanted to justify the indulgence and the numbers dont stack up. Yet.
Of course, I based that on current rates. If basic subs go to $50/month, exclude coding agents, and API skyrockets...well fuck, I'll go back to modding and retro gaming. I still remember how to code in ARexx, BlitzBasic etc and I keep threatening to make an Amiga or C64 stuff...there are other rabbit holes :)
PS: Lemmy spying on me; YouTube just recommended this
Easy come, easy go
Easy come, easy go. Fuck me, a human wrote that.
Even if they weren’t abandoned, you shouldn’t use them.
Well, yeah. There are lots of reasons. But basic self-interest is something we can all agree on.
Just don't install anything new after 2022. Easy way to get actual code audited by human beings.
Look, I think there's probably a charitable and uncharitable read for this.
The charitable read is that people are excited to be able to bring their projects to fruition and want to share it, but don't realise how much structure is required around that.
There's probably also a selection pressure that forces most projects into that same shape of "we built", "we shipped", "curious to hear your thoughts".
Reddit is rife with that lingo, but Reddit is also probably 3/4 of the way to Moltbook now.
The other reading is to just assume that this is a symptom of the same influencer hustle culture / LinkedIn brain that's everywhere in mainstream.
I also think - with enough engineering discipline, project management skills and QC audits, someone competent (but who otherwise lacks programming syntax and fluency) could use AI to create something worthwhile, safe and sane. To my understanding, that's what PMs do IRL.
Obviously, I'm not saying that most people who vibe code do that or there won't be bugs or issues. OTOH, you can also say that for hand-coded projects.
Adjacently, there's also been a trend towards harassment of FOSS developers that's almost the mirror image of this - the same lack of accountability, just aimed in the opposite direction.
If you didn't pay for it (and I don't mean throwing $10 into a ko-fi link, once) don't expect 24hr Zendesk ticket support. As Bluey is fond of reminding us: you get what you get and you don't get upset.
Slop code isn't an AI problem. It's a people problem.