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.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
What self-hosted alternative would you recommend for document collaboration? Word processing docs, spreadsheets, pdf’s, etc.
I was using Nextcloud, but it’s not been as straightforward for file-sharing as I’d like, multiple people can’t work on a document at once, and it doesn’t save changes consistently (especially with fillable PDF’s).
This is neat! Bookmarking this. Not sure what you’re using on the backend, but are you open to contributions for more detailed descriptions?
I use NextJS for both front and backend. I'm open for any contributions if you're interested.
Maybe you wanna collaborate with selfh.st to complete each others list?
Edit: Looked at the list. Good job on the design and content. Bookmarked it :)
We've talked with Ethan (owner of selfh.st) and shared some insights, but I'd definitely be open to collaboration. I don't think merging both sites is possible since we're focusing on different topics, but maybe we can figure something out.
Wow, that's a really complete list. Thanks for sharing! I might check out Dokploy some time, it sounds interesting.
You should check it for sure! I actually use it to deploy some of the services I need for running OpenAlternative.
Thank you all for the comments and the feedback! I've implemented most of the things reported. You can now filter the self-hosted tools by category directly in the filters. Tool cards should now show more info about the product on hover (longer description and the most popular alternative).
If you see anything else to improve, let me know.
Your self hosted page should have the categories listed too.
Done 👍
Great stuff.
One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying "Your secure, open-source note-taking companion". I guess that's technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)
They even say so explicitly:
This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so
— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
And fine, if they want to do that it's up to them. I'd just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.
The Free Software Foundation requires "CLAs" as well. I have no fear that they're going to rug-pull. I don't think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it's even a good idea to have a CLA so that's no conflict that the project owns the code.
The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn't, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don't).
Maybe a filter by license?
Love the list, but scrolling through, the one liners don't mean much for a lot of these.
The descriptions are just too short and vague to even understand what a lot of them actually do.
Added longer description and major alternative when you hover over the cards. Hope that'll make it easier to browse.
Yeah, that looks amazing, and it's really quick. That's a huge improvement!
Thank you.
Noted! I have longer descriptions in the db, but didn't want to bloat the listings. Will try with a longer description soon.
It's a tough balance, you don't want a whole page for each one. Maybe if there was a clear list of tags so it's easier to understand even what category they're talking about?
For example:
Penpot
Design freedom meets open-source collaboration
I really don't know what this product category even is. Is it for web layout? Is it a drawing program? Is it for CAD?
I'm tired of Cloudflare ... 😔
Sorry about that, had to enable attack mode temporarily to fight bots. Should be fine now.
In addition to other suggestions, the cards need to show what they're alternative to without clicking.
When you hover over the card, it should show the most popular alternative now.
I wish more software wasn’t “hosted” these days.
I miss app ass apps.
Don’t mind me. I’m just feeling old.
Appreciate the effort, but without categories it's not going to sail too far.
Right now it's just a long list of everything that it's out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.
Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these "10% off" green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.
Added categories now so you can filter directly in the list.
They do have categories, via the menu at the top:
I stand corrected, thank you!
So sorry for all the errors! I got crazy traffic to the website and the database is not holding on as it should. Will have to upgrade the server very soon🫡
Never heard of 99% in that list.
Also, Gitea should not be there. It is a corporate -owned open core project that was hostilely taken away from the community.
Why does it list Gitea instead of Forgejo?
What's wrong with gitea?
Seems like the owners of Gitea did something like a self-coup and kicked out community members from the project. https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/
Forgejo is the community-driven fork of Gitea.
It's really surprising how fast people forget about the shady shit rustdesk has done.
I don't see any Fediverse platforms on there, how would you feel about adding them? Seems like they'd fit.
https://openalternative.co/categories/social-media
Could add Lemmy, Mastodon, MBin, PieFed, PixelFed, Loops, PeerTube, NodeBB...