Happy winter and merry festivities!

Last year I made a post outlining many gift ideas for privacy enthusiasts. I’m back this year with an updated list. Privacy enthusiasts, by nature, are sometimes difficult to buy gifts for. This list is here to make it easier for you to come up with ideas, even if you don’t directly gift what’s on the list. I’ve decided to make a rule this year: only physical items. You can’t put a subscription under the tree.

3D printers

3D printers can turn plastic into any shape you want. While a lot of 3D printers include proprietary privacy-invasive software, there are open-source options such as RepRap. The privacy benefit of these comes in the form of homemade firearms. Traditional firearms include many elements to trace the ammunition back to the firearm, but homemade firearms (such as ones made using a 3D printer) exclude these. The reliability of the firearm depends on the quality of the 3D printer, but the designs are getting easier and easier to make.

Accessories

Especially for phones, there are a few of privacy accessories that are simple but effective.

• Faraday bags
• Lens covers (which some phone cases include)
• Microphone blockers (which is more effective as a recording jammer)
• Monitor filters (better known as privacy screen protectors)

Anonymous dress

Anonymous dress is clothing that conceals your identity in public. Obtaining these items of clothing is a chore, so it’s always easiest when it is gifted by somebody else. Black, unthemed clothing does the best job of protecting privacy. The holy grail of anonymous dress is:

• A balaclava to hide your face.
• A baseball cap to further hide your face, although a sun hat does a better job.
• A hooded down jacket to hide body shape and skin color. There are significantly long down jackets that extend below the knees that can somewhat conceal your gait too. Last year I included jackets that spoof AI recognition or blind infrared cameras, but those are very difficult to find and can be very identifying.
• Elevator shoes to conceal your height.
• Sunglasses to hide your eyes. Reflectacles do the best job of this.
• Touchscreen gloves to prevent fingerprints and still be able to use touchscreens. Normal gloves work when paired with a capacitive stylus.
• An umbrella to hide your clothing from surveillance cameras.

Ciphers

Not all encryption is digital. Traditionally, complex codes and ciphers were created to conceal messages. Hardware devices like the enigma machine were used to further aide the process. Modern versions of those devices, as well as related items such as invisible ink are still around and can be a fun project.

Computers

Laptops, desktops, and servers are all useful devices for accessing digital services privately. While there is no best choice, some lists can help shine some light on which hardware is considered secure:

• PrivSec.dev Laptop Hardware Security
• Qubes OS Hardware Compatibility List

Concealment devices

Concealment devices are things that look like ordinary objects, but in some way or another, have a hidden compartment used for storage. These are excellent ways to hide sensitive items such as cash, backup security tokens, and more. These are excellent gifts if you’re giving one-on-one rather than at a party.

Cryptocurrency wallets

Cryptocurrency wallets are devices used to securely store (the keys for) cryptocurrency such as the private cryptocurrency Monero. The two best options are:

• Ledger
• Trezor

Dumb tech

Dumb tech is the opposite of smart tech. It doesn’t connect to every device in your house. It doesn’t broadcast that data to a corporation. It doesn’t get exposed in a data breach. It doesn’t get hacked. It doesn’t go down when the internet goes offline. Things like dumb TVs or dumb cars are becoming harder to find but more and more valuable for privacy.

Mail

Mail is almost always sensitive. For that reason, it’s useful to protect the contents by using security envelopes. For delivering packages privately, it’s also useful to have a label printer capable of printing shipping labels.

Money

Banks and payment service providers are almost always incredibly privacy invasive and offer poor security. While some of these issues can be mitigated with services like Privacy, it doesn’t fix the underlying issue. Anonymous payments not only protect your privacy, but protect your money too, and having the ability to make payments like these is what allows privacy to further grow. Anonymous payment methods include:

• Cash
• Gift cards (when purchased with cash and adequate anonymous dress)
• Monero (which is physical when paired with a cryptocurrency wallet)
• Stored-value card (when purchased with cash and adequate anonymous dress)

Optical discs

Optical discs are a physical way to store movies, shows, music, games, and more. The idea is that, instead of paying a subscription and streaming content, you can pay a one-time fee and get the full quality media offline. This is also excellent for ripping to create a digital archive to stream from your own servers for free.

Paper

Your most sensitive information is put at risk the moment it becomes digitized, so pen and paper isn’t so bad for some uses:

• Earlier this year, Amazon removed the option to download and transfer ebooks. It’s becoming increasingly harder to “own” an ebook, especially without using privacy-invasive software. For that reason, books are much better for privacy.
• Calendar apps are convenient for reminders, but they often sync to cloud services or include telemetry. Physical calendars are a good way to have peace of mind knowing that your personal events are away from prying eyes and can be erased without a trace.
• Notebooks are also useful for the same reasons as books. There are also numerous benefits to writing things down instead of typing them.

Paper shredders

Paper shredders destroy sensitive documents to prevent obtaining sensitive information by digging through landfills. However, shredded documents can be recovered using automated software. The paper shredder industry hasn’t discovered fire yet, it seems.

Power cables

Most cables carry both power and data. However, that can be exploited by cleverly designing fake power stations that discreetly steal data when plugged into devices. Some cables only deliver power, without delivering data. These are incredibly useful for protecting vulnerable devices in public settings.

Printers

Printers suck. So much so that not even Framework wanted to make one. Nevertheless, a new printer called Open Printer is in the works. Until it’s finished, the best option is to gift a printer that allows printing over a wired connection.

Promotional merchandise

There is no shortage of promotional merchandise for privacy. Some of my favorites include:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Naomi Brockwell TV
• Privacy Guides

I also recently found products like this that serve a functional benefit of telling people you don’t want to be recorded without explicitly talking to them.

Rayhunter

Rayhunter is a device created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to detect Stingray attacks. It can be installed on supported devices, which are great gifts for high threat model people.

Safes

Safes are a secure box to store sensitive items. I shouldn’t need to explain why this is a good idea.

Security seals

Security seals are a special type of sticker that makes it very clear if the seal has ever been broken. This is useful to place on the case of computers or other containers that shouldn’t be opened often.

Security tokens

Security tokens are hardware devices used to authenticate accounts at a hardware level. When setup correctly, they are one of the most secure way to login. The most popular open source options are:

• Nitrokey
• OnlyKey
• SoloKeys

Smartphones

GrapheneOS is the most private and secure operating system available. They recently announced that they are partnering with an OEM to manufacture devices designed for GrapheneOS. However, until that device is made available, Google Pixels are still the only device GrapheneOS can be installed on.

USB flash drives

USB flash drives are the unsung heroes for so many areas of privacy. Whether it be installing operating systems such as Qubes OS and Tails, or creating offline Seedvault backups for GrapheneOS, USB flash drives have a multitude of uses. Just remember: it’s better to have many, smaller USB flash drives than one, large USB flash drive.

Wi-Fi hotspots

Wi-Fi hotspots are (for privacy use-cases) hardware devices that allow connecting devices to the cellular network in a much more private way. The best one that supports an excellent privacy organization is the Calyx Internet Membership.

Wired headphones

Wired headphones not only provide higher quality audio output, but they also avoid the history of security issues with Bluetooth and the surveillance capitalism that comes with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Which type of wired headphones you gift depends on a lot of factors, but one that pairs nicely with Google Pixels are the Pixel USB-C earbuds sold by Google themselves.

Wireless routers

Wireless routers often leak everything sent through them. For that reason, custom software such as OpenWrt was designed to replace the privacy invasive software preinstalled on routers. OpenWrt also created their own router called the OpenWrt One. Earlier this year, they announced that they would be creating a new router called the OpenWrt Two. It hasn’t come out yet, but maybe it will be on the list next year.

Conclusion

There is no shortage of privacy tech. The same technology that empowers privacy is the thin veil slowing down the world from its dystopian target. Giving the gift of privacy means giving the gift of a better future for those of us fighting on the front lines.

Lack-of-AI notice

I’ve been burned before, so I always try to mention that none of my content is AI generated. It isn’t even AI assisted. Just because something is comprehensive and well-structured does not make it AI generated. Every word I write is my own. Thank you for your understanding.

I wanted to share an interesting statistic with you. Approximately 1 out of every 25 people with a Google Pixel phone is running GrapheneOS right now. While it’s difficult to get an exact number, we can make educated guesses to get an approximate number.

How many GrapheneOS users are there? According to an estimate released by GrapheneOS today, the number of GrapheneOS devices is approaching 400,000. This estimate is based on the number of devices that downloaded recent GrapheneOS updates. Some users may have multiple devices, such as organizations, and some users may download and flash updates externally, but it’s the best estimate we have.

How many Google Pixel users are there? Despite Google’s extensive data collection, this one is surprisingly harder to estimate, since Google hasn’t released an exact number. There’s a number floating around that Google has 4-5% of the smartphone market, which is between 10 million and 13.2 million users in the United States. I can’t find the source of where this information came from. That number is problematic, too, because Japan supposedly uses more Google Pixel phones than the United States. The Pixel 9 series was also a big jump in market share for Google. I couldn’t find any numbers smaller than 10 million, and it made the math nice, so that is what I went with.

Putting the numbers together, it means that 4% of Google Pixel users are running GrapheneOS. That means in a room of 25 Google Pixel users, 1 of them will be a GrapheneOS user. If you include all custom Android operating systems, that number would certainly be much, much higher.

To put it into perspective, each pixel in this image represents ~5 Google Pixel users. Each white pixel represents that those ~5 people use GrapheneOS:

Even with generous estimates to Google’s market share, GrapheneOS still makes up a large portion of their users.

FreeTube wasn’t loading a video, so I tried opening it in the YouTube website instead. Rather than being able to watch a 13 second video (here it is in case anyone wants to know), I managed to capture is one of the most dystopian screenshots I’ve personally seen. Every single element of this image is truly astounding if you look close enough and think about it for a moment.

13 seconds of your life now costs you even more time to prove you’re not trying to scrape a video from a hundred billion dollar corporation with nearly infinite resources, advertisements and clickbait grabbing at your attention, every interaction logged and sold to thousands of data brokers, and you can’t even show your appreciation without selling more information by creating an account. How did we get here?

After making a post about comparing VPN providers, I received a lot of requested feedback. I’ve implemented most of the ideas I received.

Providers

• AirVPN
• IVPN
• Mozilla VPN
• Mullvad VPN
• NordVPN
• NymVPN
• Private Internet Access (abbreviated PIA)
• Proton VPN
• Surfshark VPN
• Tor (technically not a VPN)
• Windscribe

Notes

• I’m human. I make mistakes. I made multiple mistakes in my last post, and there may be some here. I’ve tried my best.
• Pricing is sometimes weird. For example, a 1 year plan for Private Internet Access is 37.19€ first year and then auto-renews annually at 46.73€. By the way, they misspelled “annually”. AirVPN has a 3 day pricing plan. For the instances when pricing is weird, I did what I felt was best on a case-by-case basis.
• Tor is not a VPN, but there are multiple apps that allow you to use it like a VPN. They’ve released an official Tor VPN app for Android, and there is a verified Flatpak called Carburetor which you can use to use Tor like a VPN on secureblue (Linux). It’s not unreasonable to add this to the list.
• Some projects use different licenses for different platforms. For example, NordVPN has an open source Linux client. However, to call NordVPN open source would be like calling a meat sandwich vegan because the bread is vegan.
• The age of a VPN isn’t a good indicator of how secure it is. There could be a trustworthy VPN that’s been around for 10 years but uses insecure, outdated code, and a new VPN that’s been around for 10 days but uses up-to-date, modern code.
• Some VPNs, like Surfshark VPN, operate in multiple countries. Legality may vary.
• All of the VPNs claim a “no log” policy, but there’s some I trust more than others to actually uphold that.
• Tor is special in the port forwarding category, because it depends on what you’re using port forwarding for. In some cases, Tor doesn’t need port forwarding.
• Tor technically doesn’t have a WireGuard profile, but you could (probably?) create one.

Takeaways

• If you don’t mind the speed cost, Tor is a really good option to protect your IP address.
• If you’re on a budget, NymVPN, Private Internet Access, and Surfshark VPN are generally the cheapest. If you’re paying month-by-month, Mullvad VPN still can’t be beat.
• If you want VPNs that go out of their way to collect as little information as possible, IVPN, Mullvad VPN, and NymVPN don’t require any personal information to use. And Tor, of course.

ODS file: https://files.catbox.moe/cly0o6.ods

I made a spreadsheet comparing different open source VPN providers.

Part 2 here

Providers

• IVPN
• Mozilla VPN
• Mullvad VPN
• NymVPN
• Proton VPN

Notes

• Please do not start a flame war about Proton.
• Please do not start a flame war about cryptocurrencies. Monero is the only cryptocurrency listed because of its privacy.
• The very left column is the category for each row, the middle section is the various VPN providers, and the right section is which VPNs are the best in each category.
• IVPN has two differing plans, which is why “Standard” and “Pro” are sometimes differentiated.
• For accounts, “Generated” means a random identifier is created for you to act as your account, “Required” means you must sign up yourself. Proton VPN allows guest use under specific conditions (e.g. installed from the Google Play Store), but otherwise requires an account.
• Switzerland is seen as more private than Sweden. Gibraltar is seen as privacy neutral.
• All prices are in United States Dollars. Tax is not included.
• Pricing is based on the price combination to achieve the exact time frame. For example, Proton VPN does not have a 3 year plan but you can achieve 3 years by combining a 2 year plan with a 1 year plan.
• The availability section is security based. Availability is framed around a GrapheneOS and secureblue setup.
• The Proton VPN Flatpak is unofficial, but based on the official code.
• Availability on secureblue is based on the ujust install-vpn command. Security features must be disabled on secureblue in order to use the GUI for IVPN and Mullvad VPN, but not for Proton VPN. Mozilla VPN and NymVPN are available as Flatpaks, which are safer than layering packages.
• I wanted to include more categories, such as which programming languages they are written in, connection speed, and security, but that became far too difficult and complex, so I decided to omit those categories.

Takeaways

• NymVPN is very very new, but it’s off to a strong start. It wins in almost every category. I actually hadn’t heard of it until I started this project.
• If you want a free VPN, Proton VPN is the only one here that meets that requirement.
• If you want to pay week-by-week, IVPN is the only one that allows that.
• If you’re paying month-by-month on a budget, Mullvad VPN is the cheapest option.
• NymVPN is the cheapest plan for anything past 1 month.
• If you want to use Accrescent as your main app store, IVPN is the only VPN available there for now.
• If you want to pay for a bundle of apps, including a VPN, Proton sells more than just a VPN.
• Mozilla VPN is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is a verified Flatpak, but NymVPN also has that so it doesn’t even matter.

I would spend the time to write this in my usual lovely article style, but I’m too upset to do that right now. To put it bluntly: email and phone numbers suck. They both need to die.

Emails

Security

Email, like many other protocols, was not originally designed with privacy or security in mind. You can get “less bad” email providers such as Proton Mail or Tuta Mail, but those only have basic privacy when contacting other emails using the same provider.

Email is one of many protocols designed in the early days of the internet before privacy and security were considered. Since then, there have been Band-Aid solutions added to email to give it some semblance of security, but it is still fundamentally insecure. It lacks many of the features that modern communication protocols like the Signal Protocol and SimpleX Chat Protocol have.

Aliases

One major flaw with emails is that people commonly use the same email for everything. That not only becomes a unique identifier, but it makes it nearly impossible to fight spam and puts all your accounts at risk if your email is breached.

A solution was created to fix this problem in the form of email aliasing services such as addy.io or SimpleLogin. These services allow you to create a large number of random email addresses that all forward to your real email address. This allows you to avoid using a unique identifier for every website, and block spam by simply disabling the email alias.

Email aliasing is great… when it’s accepted. Many services have begun blocking email aliases because aliasing eliminates a unique identifier. People (allegedly) use aliasing to create multiple accounts to abuse free services.

Overuse

Email is required to sign up on almost every website. As mentioned previously, it has many security flaws and email aliasing only partially helps. Websites abuse the fact that emails are supposed to be a unique identifier, so they use it for things like multi-factor authentication or login alerts. Neither of those are what email was designed for, and you only end up putting your account at risk by using it compared to authenticator apps like Aegis Auth or Ente Auth.

Email is also used to sign up for news letters, receive shipping alerts, send sensitive information for jobs and job applications, contacting most businesses, even logging into some computers. All of these pose a risk if you don’t use email aliasing or if your email is breached. What upsets me most is seeing open source software requiring email addresses, like GitLab, Codeberg, many Lemmy instances, etc. These shouldn’t request anything past a username and a password.

Email overuse has gotten so bad that many disposable email services like Maildrop have been created in order to generate throwaway emails to get past authwall screens. These should never be used for real accounts because anyone can access them and, as I mentioned before, most websites will allow you to login only by verifying your email.

Anonymous Email

Email providers are being hit with mass sign-ups because of how often email is used. Because of this, many email providers block you from signing up if you are connected to a VPN or Tor. This means that in order to create a single email address to do almost anything across the internet, you must give away your IP address to the email provider first, effectively deanonymizing yourself. The internet was supposed to be built to be free, but giving away your personal information to access content doesn’t sound very free to me.

Kill Emails

Emails are outdated, overused, and not private. They were never designed to be (ab)used the way they are right now. Even something as simple as setting up Git or GnuPG asks for your email, or signing up for a local event. This needs to stop. Using fake emails doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

Phone Numbers

Gratis

If you thought free emails were bad, imagine paying to have your privacy disrespected. A single phone number will cost you a monthly subscription, even if you only need to receive a single text. Prepaid SIM cards are becoming a dying art, especially in the United States. Most mobile phone operators will make you buy and activate an eSIM, which requires an egregious amount of personal information to activate (including email). Most payphones have been abolished too, meaning you can hardly pay by the minute anymore.

Security

Phone numbers don’t even pretend to be private or secure. It’s sent unencrypted to anyone with a $15 antenna, and intercepted by almost every government in the world. Salt typhoon showed just how abysmal cellular security really is. RCS and iMessage are slight steps up in terms of privacy (providing at least some encryption), but it barely provides any protection.

Phone numbers in this respect are even worse than email. SS7 attacks can trivially intercept communications by anyone without any user interaction. That is an easy way to grab multi-factor authentication codes sent via SMS. Despite all of these known issues, people still insist on using phone numbers for almost everything.

Aliases

While not free, you can use services such as MySudo to create phone number aliases. These aliases are really just real phone numbers, all of which you own. Unfortunately, these phone numbers are VoIP numbers, which many services block.

Overuse

Like emails, phone numbers are used in a lot of applications. Because they cost money, they are a better unique identifier than emails, since people are less likely to own multiple. Phone numbers may be required to create accounts, apply for jobs, do almost anything government related, and much more. All of this is done unencrypted and intercepted.

My favorite: in many places, you have to use a phone to contact non-emergency services. The homeless and other people who can’t afford phone numbers are unable to report crimes since there are no pay phones. Even visiting the police station in person will get you turned away and told that you must call (speaking from experience) no matter how much you try to convince them.

Thankfully, many times when a phone number is asked for you can put in a fake phone number without risk. For many applications, throwaway number services will also work. Applying for jobs, a lot of the time you will be asked for your phone number. If you simply inform them that you do not have a phone number, most will accept that or (at worst) give you a funny look. I would prefer email when applying for jobs anyways since you aren’t sprung with a sudden call.

Anonymous Phone Numbers

The only way to get an anonymous phone number (without risking buying second hand) is to buy a burner phone with cash, a prepaid (e)SIM, and use as much fake information as possible (even the area code). This will easily run you $45+, and requires a subscription to keep using it. Beware that the phone you use it with may disrespect your privacy in other ways.

Kill Phone Numbers

Phone numbers are one of the least private and least secure methods of communication. It is under active mass surveillance, and costs way too much money. It’s good to see younger generations moving away from phone numbers towards third party services (no matter how bad they are), because that means that there is hope of killing phone numbers once and for all.

Kill Both

Anyone can create an email. Anyone can buy a phone number. It should not be used as a unique identifier, and certainly should not be used for authentication purposes. We need to stop overusing insecure, nonprivate communications, and start normalizing using Signal usernames or SimpleX Chat addresses for general use. Currently, if you stick only those on your resume for your contact information, you will most likely not receive a message back. That needs to stop. Phone numbers and emails can get leaked and cause endless spam/scams compared to other forms of communication. There is no reason to keep using either option when so many better options are available.

Try to create a full software stack without using services that request your email or phone number, and you will begin to see just how bad the problem has gotten. Some services like Mullvad VPN and KYCnot.me have begun requiring no personal information at all to create an account, not even a password. They randomly generate account numbers to be used to login. I want to see more of that instead of…

About

It has always bothered me that privacy has no unified symbol. Every community has their own take on how privacy should be visualized. I want to unify the privacy community across the internet. It is my belief that, with a universal symbol for privacy, we will grow stronger. We will have a symbol to represent us. We will have a flag to fly.

Icon

The icon is a clipart created by librarian Gordon Dylan Johnson which can be found here. The size of the icon is large enough to still fit if the flag is cropped to a square/circular aspect ratio.

Dimensions

The size of the flag is 140 by 90 centimeters. These dimensions are chosen because of the dimensions of a Tor Browser window (1400x900 pixels).

Colors

The color blue (Azure) was chosen because it symbolizes security, stability, and reliability. The exact shade of blue used is the same azure color used by the flag of Europe, because of GDPR.

Design

This flag follows the “Principals of design” for vexillography.

Use it!

Use this flag for group chats, communities, profiles, stickers, patches, articles, wallpapers, real flags, anything you want to! Spread it around so it becomes a global icon for privacy. Even put it on the Wikipedia page for privacy if you can!

This is original content. AI was not used anywhere except for the bottom right image, simply because I could not find one similar enough to what I needed. This took around 6 hours to make.

Transcription (for the visually impaired)

(I tried my best)

The background is an iceberg with 6 levels, denoting 6 different levels of privacy.

The tip of the iceberg is titled “The Brainwashed” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing to hide”. The logos depicted in this section are:

• Instagram
• Apple
• TikTok
• PayPal
• Google Chrome
• CashApp
• WhatsApp
• Samsung
• Steam
• Microsoft Windows
• Ring (Security Camera)
• YouTube
• Amazon
• Discord
• Gmail
• ChatGPT

The surface section of the iceberg is titled “As seen on TV” with a quote beside it that says “This video is sponsored by…”. The logos depicted in this section are:

• NordVPN
• Bitdefender
• Incogni
• Malwarebytes
• Opera GX
• ExpressVPN

An underwater section of the iceberg is titled “The Beginner” with a quote beside it that says “I don’t like hackers and spying”. The logos depicted in this section are:

• Telegram
• Authy
• Brave Browser
• Privacy.com (Virtual Cards)
• DuckDuckGo
• iMessage
• Proton Mail
• AdBlock (Browser Extension)

A lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Enthusiast” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing I want to show”. The logos depicted in this section are:

• Signal (Messenger)
• Tuta
• addy.io
• Linux
• Bitwarden
• uBlock Origin
• Tor and Tor Browser
• ProtonVPN

An even lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Activist” with a quote beside it that says “Privacy is a human right”. The logos depicted in this section are:

• Monero
• GrapheneOS
• Vanadium (Web Browser)
• KeePassDX
• SimpleX Chat
• Accrescent
• SearXNG
• Aegis Authenticator
• OpenWrt
• Mullvad VPN
• An illustration of physical cash

The lowest portion of the iceberg is titled “The Ghost”. There is a quote beside it that has been intentionally redacted. The images depicted in this section are:

• A cancel sign over a mobile phone, symbolizing “no electronics”
• An illustration of a log cabin, symbolizing “living in a log cabin in the woods”
• A picture of gold bars, symbolizing “paying only in gold”
• A picture of a death certificate, symbolizing “faking your own death”
• An AI generated picture of a person wearing a black hoodie, a baseball cap, a face mask, and reflective sunglasses, symbolizing “hiding ones identity in public”

End of transcription.

This question has been answered. Please stop trying to repeat information that has already been said many times before. Everything in this thread is in good faith, I am here to learn, so I will make mistakes. Furthermore, if you want to contribute something new, please read the entire post to avoid misunderstanding the purpose of this post.

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!

Edit: The comparison here isn’t between selfhosting and using a cloud provider. The comparison here is between selfhosting on a server and running explicitly on-device (besides where extra storage or processing power is required)

Answer

So that nobody has to dig through the comments for answers, this is what I’ve learned: In the case of Immich, its purpose isn’t designed to be a photo gallery. It’s designed to be a more polished backup solution, designed explicitly for photos and not general files. While Nextcloud could be used to backup photos, it’s not as focused on photos as Immich, and so it isn’t as nice to use for that purpose. Immich also allows you to share photos with a link, rather than relying on a cloud provider to do that for you. There’s also another benefit to selfhosting that I hadn’t entirely realized, which is availability across devices. Some things like an eBook library may not take up much space, but it’s convenient to not have to sync manually (or automatically) across devices, and instead access it from a central server. That same logic is true for RSS readers as well, since it’s inconvenient to manually add and sync feeds across devices. Syncing across devices can be done with something like Syncthing in some cases, but not all, and so that’s where selfhosting can be useful.