Normally I think LetsEncrypt made self hosting a lot easier, at least if you wanted to support HTTPS.
LetsEncrypt is what finally solved the problem with the previous systems were perfect was the enemy of the good. There used to be a lot of focus on trying to verify that the person getting the cert was who they said they are, but LetsEncrypt came and sad "that part isn't important, protecting the data is what really matters" and basically solved the real problem wholesale. Very few people inspect the certificates on every website they visit, so those protections were mostly useless and created a roadblock to widespread adoption of HTTPS, scoping the problem down to just making sure nobody can inspect or modify the data in transit made automation not only possible but easy.
Caddy and Tailscale can at least alleviate many of the issues and all-but make it automatic and painless (though both are more geared for homelab use). I agree nginx and the more standard webservers/services oftentimes don't have good support and require quite frankly too much manual configuration though. There's no excuse in 2026 for not including acme support OOTB with a single checkbox/config value. Plus, I can't believe the default ACME client is a snap (literally WHO wants this?) and not a simple static binary to help adoption/integration.
Depending on the topic, there is probably no acceptable substitute; which means, maybe Facebook, Discord or an awful videos-site (TikTok, Youtube) could act as a substitute, but then you had to use Facebook or watch Videos and let's not talk about Discord..
Reddit has gobbled up all kind of smaller specialized forums over the last decade, and established itself as the primary point of interest if you want something outside the walled social gardens. All attempts to rival them seem to have lost, and now we are at the endgame, and nobody seems to be there any more, who could take on the fight for the niche-problems of us powerusers.
Seriously, f** Reddit and their CEO. At this point I hope someone will destroy Reddit and force all the communities to liberate themselves on new free platforms. But I also know this will not happen, and even if would happen, the users are so cooked, they would just end up on other enshitificated platforms, or become even more entangled with their parasocial AI-relationship.
The free internet has lost the fight. Liberty is just business now.
> As of last month, Steam reports that >15% of their customers still have 4GB VRAM or less
4 GB is the recommended size, which manes >90% of steam-user are already in the optimal area. The lower recommendation is even 1 GB, which means >97% of steam user. Maybe if you play on a $100 mini-toaster, or some budget-laptot, it will get critical, but the vast majority of steam users are fine with playing this game.
> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them?
Some are, some not. But the motivation is the harm of algo-feeds, the potential for manipulations from bad actors.
> The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.
That's more of a delusion, it does not shows you what you want, but what engages you, which just happen often enough to be something you want.
> But then "giving people control" won't change anything.
Probably true, but feeds like are tapping into addiction-mechanisms, returning control can help to regulate this, and prevents at least lowers the harm.
Probably no big external dependencies or any assets. It looks like something full of handwritten code, down to the self-rendered UI-elements. Also it's written in C/C++ and assembler, so there is no unnecessary bloat shipped out-of-the-box.
> Having built a tool in this space, I enjoy seeing all the Calibre alternatives that have been coming out in the last few years!
If there would be just anything actually good. But for some reason they all have just very basic organisation-levels, and barely any support for handling custom data from calibre.
For some reason, streaming ebooks seems to be also not existing. One can either download the whole book, or use some lousy in-browser-reader. So strange how the ebook-world has no decent software for selfhosting.
Kavita has a custom epub library that actually streams the epub pages. The reason why it's non-existent is due to epub being a zip, with a manifest of pages and images. Each page is an html document, so it may have images requested from that manifest.
Most applications just use epub.js which needs the whole book loaded at once.
Edit: Also Kavita does support some calibre tags for metadata and def is much more customizable with a powerful filtering system which you can then bind to your dashboard/side nav.
www.kavitareader.com for those that might be interested (or check the wiki to get a bit more about it).
> what is it that you want from your library management tool?
Custom fields for metadata and accessibility from different devices. Usually there is only hardcoded metadata, tags or categories and one or more systems for collections. And moving data between different software is also quite limited of course.
At the moment I manage everything with calibre on desktop, and use calibre-sync(?) on mobile which has full support for calibres metadata, including the custom fields. But it has no builtin reader and a very unoptimized interface. So the whole handling is very cumbersome, I have to first filter for what I seek, then download it, then change to the reader-app, and maybe organize the file there too, and afterwards I have to delete the local file and manage stuff on desktop like read-state, rating, etc.
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