On Traditional Apps and Modern Self-Hosting

Many years ago we took photos and we had to wait for the roll to be developed and when it was developed we either kept our photos in the sleeve with the negatives, or we put them in photo albums. Later we took digital photos and we downloaded them to our computers and put them in chaotic folders.

With times apps gave the illusion of our photographs being organised into folders with event names and more information. As these albums evolved so they added date, location, facial recognition and more. For a long time everything was kept on our laptop or even desktop. As our photo albums grew and grew so we moved from having photos locally on local apps, to having local apps that uploaded our photos and videos to the cloud.

In the process we shifted from a culture of having apps on our computers to apps that were hybdrid, starting from our laptop and going to the cloud.

The middle device that was our laptop eventually was skipped. Our photos went from our cameras and phones straight to the cloud, and from the cloud to our local machine. In the process we moved towards cloud computing, from local apps.

Eventually using cloud services became so ordinary that we shifted from having local apps to cloud services, and we came up with the term self-hosting. The paradox of self-hosting is that we reverted to our old habit, of keeping things locally, as well as in the cloud.

Photoprism, and Immich, a few years ago would have been seen like Picasa, iPhoto and other apps. We would have seen it as normal to have apps locally rather than in the cloud. It’s a comment on the cultural shift that we see self-hosting as special, and a statement.

We forgot that back in the day local hosting was normal.

Of course there has been a huge cultural shift. Everyone has at least one or two phones and a 360 camera, a drone, a photo camera, possibly a video camera and more. Each of these devices can upload to our phones, and from our phones to everywhere.

In recent weeks kDrive and Immich have really improved, with photos being uploaded automatically much sooner than before. Whereas before I had to open kDrive and check that photos were uploaded, now I simply double check that they have been uploaded.

When you use a desktop you can upgrade storage and keep drives plugged in permanently, but when you use a laptop you want to keep it mobile. That’s why you go via the “self-hosting route” with a Raspberry Pi that was bought when RAM was still cheap.

Instead of running the app as an executable or installing it via a disk image you simply pull, configure, and bring up the services you want, and when required you pull and update the latest updates.

In the Media, Technology and society realm we see that habits are cyclical. We go from local to cloud, back to local, and we will head back to cloud with time. This post was inspired by a post saying that self-hosting is declining. I believe that we can easily have self-hosting as the primary solution, and cloud services as a backup solution.