Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.
FreshRSS for RSS reading
Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)
HomeAssistant
Calibre-web for ebooks
PiHole
Joplin for self hosted notes
Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately
I remember reading a thread like this a while back and saw Home Assistant. I thought I don't need that.
It's probably the most used self hosted app we have.
I wish you didn't have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of "programmer-knows-better" software ever engineered.
Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.
You can try to use Komga instead, but it's mostly meant for comic books and it's kinda heavy, honestly.
It is a little convoluted how it's set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I've quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
Calibre is so old that it's use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It's not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.
Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It's not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.
There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, Calibre already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that's an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they're not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.
Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.
Really, it's so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There's constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.
Hah. You get the "FOSS gets to be crap because you can't do it yourself" cop out often, but rarely when you haven't actually complained about it.
I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don't get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don't even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It's like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.
Unless you're Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don't see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I've seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I'm not sure he'd take it as an insult and I don't mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn't made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.
But since I'm at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it's FOSS. If you put it out there don't be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don't need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that's annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.
Yeah, I don't think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there's no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there's a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it's been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You're also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy's name "rough" is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.
Again, it's fine if you don't like it, don't understand it, and don't want to understand it. But that doesn't excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone's name is somehow appropriate, it's bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You're all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.
I absolutely don't understand Calibre at all. That's been my point all along.
I can tell you that I've actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I'm currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.
Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn't have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.
Because that's how it still works as of today, as it turns out.
And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than... I don't know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I'm being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.
Have you tried out https://booklore.org/ ?
It seems different enough from calibre and kavita et al.
I love Booklore. Infinitely better than Calibre hands down. I haven’t setup Kobo access yet, but that is just going to push it over the edge for me.
Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can't even remember.
In any case I'm part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I'm married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.
Export all fixes that... Doing that to my syncthing to sync my files to the ereader. Still looking for a way to get rid of calibre :(
Yeah, it's hard exit that directory structure once you have gone all in.