Selfhosted

do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this "sort" thing you speak of? I don't sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I'll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year's photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn't happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don't sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

I'm frustrated that Immich doesn't have a "back up new photos only" option.

All the photos already on my phone are in a huge external library with my backups from previous phones. I don't want to delete them from my phone just so immich doesn't freak out, and I don't wanna have them on my NAS twice
Immich seems great, but this seems like the bread and butter migration path that nearly everyone would take.

Just 2k in bookmarks? Pffft! Those are rookie numbers. Check back when you have 59k bookmarks. Currently there are 1.1k in the broken links category. The vast majority of the links are topics I research or have interest in, exterior of self-hosting. I do not consume TV data, but I do a ton of reading. I find that reading gives me better retention of the topic, and it's rather easy to highlight & search for cross comparisons, and further research. Ever since I was a wee lad, barely able to read, I have had an insatiable lust for knowing. It is this that drives the link counts. LOL

I guess the trick is to not look for stuff to host because you'll end up with all kinds of things you weren't doing in the first place.

Nothing better than a properly formatted data file.
Self hosting teaches you this

Actually, that is a thing I like. Going through this stuff can be tedious, but it brings a lots of memories, things that I forgot about, things I once wanted to do. And also, after cleaning my digital life I feel similar as after cleaning in the physical world - good - I did something, I made my world a tad bit more organized and a tad less overwhelming. (I should note that I am lazy and I always must force myself to clean, but I never regret doing that after I start 😀) P.S. as I wrote in one comment below, maybe bookmarks is not a necessarily a thing that you want to go through and sort. Here I am more writing about my notes, or photos, etc..

Have you considered the possibility that, if you have 2k bookmarks, this isn't necessarily a self-hosting issue, but rather a bookmark hoarding issue :)

Are you kidding me? True, there is time involved. My biggest 'sin' right now is "home gallery" for it works on MY directory structure which I won't give up.

The geoguessing game that hides in it is superb ! I'm still amazed with the images I've been able to locate. Sometimes 40 years back.

Karakeep. It will throw an error if a website is down and you won't get tags.

2k bookmarks? i would just automate the process of saving each of them locally and just forget it lol. if it's somehow needed later search on the older archive

Can't you use a script for that? There is a method to bulk import into linkding from Firefox and a REST API for linkding that allows you to remove all expired links.

Simplify as much as you can.

And remember, if you're also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you're gone.

I've been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.

I think that’s a feature 😅😅

Just kidding, I had no issue with my photos for example with Photoprism, but for streaming my music with gonic I need to make some modifications for all my album art to show up, and in some cases titles and album names…

Yes and no. A lot of sorting and optimizing processes can be done via scripts. For example, I had chatgpt generate one that finds audio streams in videos that are not in the language I need. Manual verification and then let another script remove the remaining lists streams that I don't need.

There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.

I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.

On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.

That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.

Hate? Digital decluttering feels really good, for me anyway.

It's important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you're getting more out than you're putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won't have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.

If you really access them that infrequently, are they actually worth keeping?

Make sure you check https://karakeep.app/, because it has, at least, automatic tagging and full text search on the bookmarks

Thanks for mentioning SingleFile. I’m not using it right now.

Isn't that the goal? If you have an old drawer full of unorganized stuff, implementing a selfhosted management tool is getting an organizer and thinking about how to fill it, but you still have to sort your stuff in.

The only selfhosted thing where I really have to re-organize is my documents in paperless but I'm so glad to finally have it all organized and searchable instead of some hot mess of an inconsistent folder structure.