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This week, a new non-profit called The Human-Centered Computing Foundation (HCCF) announced they're launching a campaign for a new top-level domain dedicated to self-hosting (.self).

Likely a response to the modern internet's transparency problems with AI and bots, the foundation is proposing a few features to ensure the new TLD avoids the same spammy reputations shared by other modern domains (.xyz), which include limiting domains to one per person, shared services via open source software (VPN and mail), and open governance.

My own private conversations with the non-profit's founders have left me feeling optimistic about their goals and motives, despite how difficult some of this may be to actually implement. For example, how do you limit every person to a single domain? Will I have to fight other Ethans for ethan.self? How often do we see projects implement open governance successfully?

If you're looking to contribute or provide feedback, the HCCF has spun up a Discourse forum for anyone who'd like to chime in. (Avoid the announcement post's comment section on the website itself, where users – in typical FOSS fashion – are mostly just debating the foundation's decision to release their announcement via PDF over other open formats.)

In other news and activity:

• Immich quietly discontinued the retro installation disk launched with v2 in their new v3 release, marking the official death of physical media in self-hosting
• Ente, best known for their open source Photos platform, announced they're committing to openness by publicly publishing a dashboard of their business metrics (revenue, number of customers and accounts)
• Codeberg went down for 7 hours (the amount of time it takes to figure out how Forgejo Actions work, or the half-life of a Show HackerNews post)
• Somebody developed a mobile music streaming app compatible with Navidrome, Subsonic, Jellyfin, etc., that mimics the look and feel of the iPod Classic
• OpenClaw, the infamous open source AI chatbot and agent, released native mobile apps for Android and iOS
• Microsoft released WSL containers, a Linux container runtime for Windows
• The developer behind Nomad, a portable media server for ESP32-based devices, shared an update on the project's progress (hint: it's complete)
• The BentoPDF developer announced they're developing their own PDF compression engine and plans to open source it when ready
• An ex-Microsoft developer released RetroPad, a slimmed-down, AI-free take on Windows Notepad
• A newsletter reader has created a Tumblr community for homelabbers and is inviting other users to join the discussion
• I found a new *arr app for...napping?

Happy hst.self/ing!

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Content Spotlight

Meet NoteDiscovery, a self-hosted note-taking and knowledge base platform. Developed as an open source alternative to Obsidian (albeit not quite as mature), NoteDiscovery features a familiar web interface for writing Markdown-based documents, all stored directly on the local filesystem. Features include authentication, themes, a plugin system, responsive design for mobile, LaTeX support, HTML exports, graph views, and more.

NoteDiscovery can be easily deployed via Docker Compose and doesn't require additional containers to run.

Links: Website, Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• Everything New In Home Assistant 2026.7! | Everything Smart Home
• Stop Using 5 Apps to Track Your Shows — Self-Host This Instead | AlienTech42
• The Best Docker Manager I’ve Seen! // Arcane Tutorial | Christian Lempa

Command Line Corner

Prefacing a command with time outputs the amount of time it takes to execute. (This is useful for measuring and optimizing the performance of scripts, downloads, and other tools.)

$ time python3 generate-rss.py
  real   0m8.210s
  user   0m1.779s
  sys    0m0.327s

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

• 1Panel – Modern, open source VPS control panel
• AFFiNE – Privacy-first knowledge base
• Atria – Event management and networking platform
• Dawarich – Location history tracking and insights
• Faved – Handcrafted minimal bookmark manager
• Komodo – Build and deploy software across servers
• Postiz – Agentic social media scheduling
• Servers@Home – Homelab resources and community
• tirreno – Security framework
• Uncloud – Multi-node Docker Compose for production

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