I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
I spent a lot of time setting up firefly-iii, a really neat and feature-rich finance manager. It’s a really great piece of software by a very responsive and friendly dev but after about 6 weeks I still couldn’t get used to it and ended up going back to paying for YNAB.
I swear by memos now though - highly recommended. It’s like having a private twitter stream where you can send thoughts, notes and files that you want to store/refer back to.
I spun up Firefly a few months ago and had about three weeks where I was actively categorizing transactions and reconciling everything and then my ADD kicked in. Really cool tool but I just need something low-maintenance for budget tracking.
linkding was one for me. It sounded like a great idea at first, but, I never used it. Shut it down after a couple months.
Once upon a time I set Grocy for my wife and I. It’s a kitchen inventory management site that can do some pretty cool things. I spent a whole weekend scanning every barcode in our kitchen and getting a bunch of recipes setup on the site. After all that we used it for maybe two or three weeks before it felt like to much work lol.
Do you remember if you were able to pull up items based on barcode? I’ve seen that you can record items based on barcode, but what I mean is: if I’m eating ice cream, can I scan the barcode so I can update the quantity quickly? Been searching their docs but can’t find anything 😅
I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:
- SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
- NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.
These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don’t like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I’ve cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
