Self-Host Weekly is sponsored by PikaPods, the instant open source hosting service. Run a large selection of open source apps within seconds from just $1.20/month. Server administration, updates, and backups are all taken care of, leaving you in control of your data. Try it today with $5 free welcome credit!

A community interaction that would make a great case study on AI and open source expectations recently appeared in my feed – and because I'm a petty bitch that loves drama, I'm indulging in it for this week's opener.

Earlier this week, tech YouTuber Raid Owl announced in a now unlisted video the release of Home Lab Hub, a blatantly vibe coded web app and flagrant dupe of RackPeek – a relatively new and similar project for documenting infrastructure that had been introduced to the YouTuber just a few days prior.

Quotes from the video include:

• I built a self-hosted web application...
• Now why did I do this? There are plenty of applications out there...
• I'm not patting myself on the back here, I just want to show it off...

The YouTuber was quickly called out for the lack of attribution and not disclosing the vibe coded nature of the project, to which he responded by adding a link to RackPeek in the video's description before launching into a bizarre AI rant (and unfortunate misuse of artesian) in the comments.

To his credit, Raid Owl was perfectly within his rights to develop software from scratch (vibe coded or not) without attribution. But undermining the collaboration and camaraderie that makes FOSS so great leaves me feeling squeamish about what else is to come in this AI-saturated world we call 127.0.0.1.

If you're looking for other news and gossip activity:

• NetBird, a popular remote access tool and VPN, added a built-in reverse proxy to the platform in its latest update
• Ghost (CMS) took some heat from the community for a longstanding SQL vulnerability not being addressed in the project's Docker image
• Seerr, the amalgamation of Overseerr and Jellyseerr (media requests and discovery), officially launched with a migration guide to gently ease everyone onto the new platform
• A recent Cornell University study found AGENTS.md files (often found in repos that leverage LLMs for development) actually have a negative impact on task success rates while also increasing inference costs (if you can't live without one, they recommend keeping it human-written and limited to minimum project requirements)
• Sam Altman announced OpenClaw's developer is joining OpenAI (if you're looking for another excuse not to deploy the AI chatbot platform)
• A newsletter reader recently shared a new hardware project they're crowdsourcing called PokyPow, an ESPHome-based micro-controller for managing PC power states via Home Assistant
• The FULU Foundation (advocacy group founded by Louis Rossman) is offering a $10,000 bounty for the development of a solution to de-couple Ring cameras from Amazon's cloud in response to their disastrous Super Bowl ad
• Western Digital announced they're officially out of HDD capacity as their consumer share has also significantly decreased (hope you were able to gobble up those Linux ISOs while you still had the chance)
• Somebody developed an Immich client for Windows Phone 8.1

Happy selfh.st/ing!

Newswire

Feedback

Content Spotlight

Meet Hister, a self-hosted tool for tracking and searching visited websites and browsing history. With Hister, users can easily capture and store their web activity for later retrieval without a concern for prying eyes or the need to sacrifice browsing habits to AI tools. Features include full-text indexing, advanced search, blacklist and priority rules, browser extensions, offline previews, and search aliases.

Hister can be easily deployed via a pre-built binary or Docker for those willing to build the image themselves as a pre-built image is not currently available.

Links: Website, Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• RackPeek: Finally Document Your Home Lab the Easy Way | DB Tech
• Is Jellyfin 10.11 Their Biggest Update Yet? | Servers@Home
• Virtual Machines vs LXC vs Docker: What’s the Real Difference? | Lawrence Systems
• AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet | Jeff Geerling
• I Found a Shockingly Fast Self-Hosted File Server | AlienTech42

Command Line Corner

Press tab while in the middle of typing a file name for auto-complete from the command line (only works when a single match is found):

$ cat exa_
$ cat example.txt
  self-
  host
  weekly

Thanks to following executive sponsors, whose continued support makes this newsletter possible:

• AFFiNE
• Atria
• Databasus
• Postiz
• Servers@Home
• tirreno
• Vigilant

Submit Content

I'm always looking for new and existing self-hosted content to share in Self-Host Weekly. Submit the form below if you'd like to have your own content featured or have a suggestion for content types you'd like to see featured in future newsletters.