Every so often, I poke my head out of my self-hosting hole to (1) appreciate the chaos I avoid by self-hosting, and (2) watch the world burn. This week was one of those weeks.

AI watermarking dominated the conversation for much of it (here's a neat primer if you need it). Anthropic was forced to defend Claude's latest capabilities given the EU AI Act's new disclosure requirements, while later that same day, Google announced Gemini users are now able to opt out of visible watermarks on their "creations".

We also learned RAM prices have climbed 500% in the last 12 months from a recent study published by Tom's Hardware – just a few days before Stripe announced they're buying OpenRouter for $7.5B. (I wonder if there's a correlation...)

And if all of that sounds batsh*t to you, it gets worse:

• A Kentucky school shared a bizarre AI-generated map of the U.S. with its students (I'm from Vestrntane, if you've ever wondered)
• Some guy hid a prompt injection in his legal filing that encouraged the court's AI to rule in his favor (fortunately, the court confirmed it does not use AI for these reviews)
• The BBC uncovered a controversial practice called destructive scanning, where AI companies are buying second-hand books and destroying their spines to make them easier to scan (sounds like they should have consulted with this developer)
• Meta launched Pocket, a TikTok-style app for vibe coding mini-games and sharing them with others
• A keen-eyed developer discovered Apple's AirPods may have cameras in them based on a video found in the latest macOS release candidate (move over, smart glasses)
• Mark Zuckerberg purchased a castle in Ireland (?)

We really do live in the strangest timeline.

(If you read this newsletter for news that's actually relevant to self-hosting – GitHub experienced an 8-hour outage, Debian is preparing a vote on AI contributions, Plex finally admitted their recent design changes stink, there's a new contender for the worst-named *arr app, and a reader asked me to share an ad-free self-hosting break-even calculator they recently published.)

Happy selfh.st/ing!

Newswire

Feedback

Content Spotlight

Meet Floppy, a self-hosted media tracker and alternative to Trakt, Letterboxd, and TV Time. Floppy gives users a unified interface for tracking movies, TV, anime, books, games, music, and podcasts from a modern grid-based interface. Features include watch history, recap statistics, shareable lists, owned-media tracking, and sync integrations for automation (Plex, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, etc.).

Floppy can be easily deployed via Docker and requires a separate Redis (or compatible service) container.

Links: Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• Protect your MCP Server with OAuth 2.1 in just 5 minutes with Pocket ID | Pocket ID
• Unraid 8 Explained: New Distro, Docker Compose, Backups and more | The Uncast Show
• Cal.com Went Closed Source — So I Switched to This | Servers@Home
• A Walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City in One HTML File | Grow Now! Games
• Destroying My Homelab With Kubernetes | Linux Society UNSW 2026
• Open Source, AI, and You. | Awesome Open Source
• Building my new Proxmox Cluster! — 10 Gigabit Ethernet on a Mini PC! | Cameron Gray

Command Line Corner

Run docker system prune every so often to remove dangling containers, volumes, and images:

$ docker system prune

  Total reclaimed space: 34.1GB

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

• AFFiNE – Privacy-first knowledge base
• Atria – Event management and networking platform
• Dawarich – Location history tracking and insights
• Faved – Handcrafted minimal bookmark manager
• Karakeep – The bookmark everything app
• Komodo – Build and deploy software across servers
• Postiz – Agentic social media scheduling
• Rasputin – Homelab cluster OS and control plane
• Seamside – Small internet made from your people's devices
• Servers@Home – Homelab resources and community
• tirreno – Security framework
• Uncloud – Multi-node Docker Compose for production
• Wintertrace – Winter service and snow removal tracking

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.