Meet the Self-Hosted Movement

Cloud adoption rates have been growing for many years now, with 73 percent of companies planning to move to a fully software-defined data center within 2 years. While companies large and small are abandoning on-premise infrastructures and outsourcing technologies and services from third-parties, there’s a hidden undercurrent of people who refuse to give up control over their data and capabilities, and they call themselves the self-hosted movement.

What Is the Self-Hosted Movement?

The self-hosted movement is comprised of individuals who advocate for alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or control. The r/self-hosted subreddit is considered to be the headquarters of the self-hosted movement, currently counting almost 30,000 subscribers from around the world.

Another important meeting ground for self-hosted advocates is the Awesome-Selfhosted GitHub repository, which is a list of free software network services and web applications that can be hosted locally. The list has been updated over 2000-times by more than 400 contributors, and it includes everything from blogging platforms to calendaring to communications systems to feed readers to file sharing to note-taking and web servers, and much more.

Examples of Self-Hosted Applications

Plex

Plex is a media player system that allows you to aggregate all your personal media and access it anywhere you go. It’s perfect for entertainment addicts with large collections of movies, TV shows, and podcasts, as well as for cord-cutters who would like to save money by streaming free over-the-air live television and recording their favorites. Plex consists of two components, the Plex Media Server, which runs on any Mac, Windows, and Linux computer, and Plex Apps, which are available on phones, tablets, gaming consoles, smart TVs, and streaming devices.

NextCloud

NextCloud is a software suite for creating and using file hosting services similar to Dropbox or Google Drive. It’s written in PHP and JavaScript and is free and open source. NextCloud features a modular architecture that makes it possible to extend its functionality to include a browser-based text editor, bookmarking service, URL shortening suite, gallery, RSS feed reader, and more. NextCloud desktop clients are available for PCs running Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS is a free RSS/Atom feed reader that you can easily install on your web server and use to keep up with the news. It’s open source and requires PHP version 5.4 or newer to run. Several third-party Tiny Tiny RSS clients are available for both Android and iOS, but Tiny Tiny RSS itself is mobile-ready, so it’s entirely possible to use it from any modern web browser.

Conclusion

The self-hosted movement wants to return computing to the hands of individual users without giving up the conveniences we’ve got used to since we entered the era of cloud computing. Sizeable communities of self-hosted advocates are hidden in several places online, the largest one being the r/self-hosted subreddit. The self-hosted movement is open to anyone who isn’t afraid to learn new things and wants to enjoy more privacy and better security.