If Smarttube goes tits up, that was basically my plan.
Archiving wise: the "forbidden resolution" (540p) gets a lot of bang for buck. I think I scoped out something like 3-4yrs of continuous content (playing 3-4hrs a day) would fit in 1TB. It was something stupid like 8,000 x 20 min YouTube vids.
In theory, you could create a seed bank of (say) 500GB of higher quality content, with weekly or monthly scrapes of new stuff with expiry based on views... but that's how we get into 4AM over a engineering. Again.
I actually wonder sometimes how it's survived this long.
There are ... alternative methods. Fiddly, you have to roll your own, added frustration... but it could be done. Though I hope I never have to.
OTOH, it's a bit like hydra - cut one head off, three more appear. Until google fully locks down YouTube (and they might), there will always be wiggle room.
Honestly, I think they know that if they get too annoying, everyone will go elsewhere, so they are boiling the frog slowly. I'd bet Smarttube, Revanced, PipePipe etc are the Zion to YouTube's Matrix - allowed to exist as a pressure release valves.
I work in the medical field. All my it IT skills are self taught, starting way back with coding in BASIC in C64 and taking apart RC cars.
With enough interest and persistence, you can learn what you need to. IT skills are pretty democratic.
Self hosting stuff is a great gateway drug because it introduces...complications. The path between A and B always seems to take detours, which is where the learning happens.
It's interesting reading people talking about problem X, with everyone confidently advocating solution Y. I often find myself thinking "well, that's not been my experience. I would just do A".
It's good to see how other people solve similar problems. Eventually you'll arrive at that old homily "the way you do one thing is the way you do everything", which is useful too.
Ultimately, just.. start anywhere. Soon enough something will piss you off enough that you roll up your sleeves and work the problem - don't look, but you'll be learning those IT skills IRL without having to crack a textbook.
If you use real-debride, it's basically a cloud cache. Meaning - after it fetches your stream / you finish watching it, it retains the download for you (30 days?) - or at least the index. So if you pop over to real-debride thereafter, you can download and store what you watched locally right quick.
There are tools that integrate the *arr stack to do just that...if you're looking to have your cake and eat it.
There's part of me that thinks this is pure nostalgia bait - we grew up on the internet, we're middle-aged now, everything was better when we were young, shake fist at cloud.
OTOH, author isn't wrong. The mainstream net genuinely ain't what she used to be. The exact blame for that I don't know and it doesn't matter - we're in the shit now.
That's why niche sites like Lemmy, small web, RSS feeds etc are still so valuable. They're messy and human, like things used to be (tm). The trouble is finding them.
What I notice most is that I don't really search anymore; I use the internet like an appliance. "Want info about A, go to X. Want info about B, go to Y".
It's all horribly efficient. In fact, in a recent !privacy comment (on best search engines) I basically said "I don't really search any more. Search is shit. I use these tools instead"
So the author's point about use of AI tools is worth chewing on (what with Lemmy being famously anti-AI). I think we're now at the point where AI-assisted tools - self-hosted for me, thanks - are the best way to find those rabbit holes worth exploring. Even a small llm (Gemma-4-e4b) tied into good MCP tools can produce a really good "super Google, without the spam, find me X".
In fact, one of the main reasons I self host (yes, mine's solar powered) is that specifically.
Ultimately though, I think smaller, more curated space (yes, like Lemmy and yes, please stop trying to turn it into the next Reddit) are going to be the last bastions of the old internet.
Yeah...this Circlus thing has a particular odor to it. Knew it was too good to be true but wanted to double check, as had not heard of it before. Thanks for confirming.
It's server-less, which is one less thing to host. Text chat already works. The main problems are broken image/file transfer (literally craps itself with anything > 5kb in testing) and no useful notifications. So I will fix those, then probably add offline message queuing. The codebase is small and simple enough (he said, ominously) and if I don't scope creep, this should do the job nicely.
My kids are really into PictoCHAT on their DSes, so I'm thinking of it as something along those lines.
I want something that only works on the local WLAN, between vetted devices, and does not rely on Google accounts, FCM or other cloud middleware. I don't allow them unlimited access to the net / social media, so am engineering in house solutions. The base app here already keeps communication on the LAN, and I will add the device-vetting part. It looks like it's configured down to Android 5.1, so I can install it on old junkers without SIM cards, modern tablets, etc. That way the kids can play around with it (without doing something they shouldn't), take it camping (hotspot) etc. I'll need to reroll the Android APK. Could be a fun little project...
Aw crap, I may have awakened something in me....like hosting another bloody service the kids will use once and then just quit. No amount of my over-engineering can solve user apathy...so this time I'm investing less effort :)
There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more...I'm doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It's probably relevant here too. Urgh...these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.
I've actually got to sit down today and do some coding..I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus...ain't nobody writing this shit for you.
The reddit analogy may have been bad. What I meant was: there's usually a side door and it's usually simpler. You don't have to walk through the whole building to get to the room you want.
But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit....
I'm probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in "OK...shit's expensive...what's the MOST I can do with the LEAST?".
I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.
For example, I specced out a (very decent) "sneakernet" / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise...and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.
That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).
I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.
Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.
Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc...and I'm over here thinking "actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming".
Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools...none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU...and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?
Honesty, I don't think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear...hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on "sale" for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.
Personally, I'm building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system... and because I'm paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.
Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my "DVD as back up server" idea.
TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game...or at least, play it by your own rules.
Kidding aside...ya'll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I'm over here using software that just...doesn't serve ads. I think the most I've had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn't connect to the net, though media stick does).
That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just..stopped using them.
Now, when I visit my folks...yeah...holy shit...but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn't go overboard.
It's a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.
Can't speak to cutting edge options but will say when we went to Tokyo at start of year, I took the google Chromecast with TV (1080p version) + USB pass-thru + 128GB flashdrive.
The Chromecast had Nova player installed. I pointed it at the flashdrive and boom - instant media front end for the kids. Had to connect briefly to scrape images etc but after that was all off line.
That - plus smart tube - meant they could decompress after a day out and about.
That version of the Chromecast has been superseded (though can still buy on eBay).
Huh? The ABC app works perfectly fine on the google Chromecast with TV (the little white hockey puck one). Hell, it works fine on my $199 TCL (2GB) from OfficeWorks.
Or did you mean the generation before that (the one that looks like a fat USB stick), where you'd be casting from your phone?
Yep, that too. Though on one of my TVs (TCL), simply disabling the inbuilt 'startupwraith' seems to have the same effect
# Disable com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx which is the default launcher on CCwGTV
$ adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx
# com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith will then be used as a 'fallback' and will automatically
# re-enable the default launcher, so disable it as well
$ adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith
hat tip
A man of culture.
If Smarttube goes tits up, that was basically my plan.
Archiving wise: the "forbidden resolution" (540p) gets a lot of bang for buck. I think I scoped out something like 3-4yrs of continuous content (playing 3-4hrs a day) would fit in 1TB. It was something stupid like 8,000 x 20 min YouTube vids.
In theory, you could create a seed bank of (say) 500GB of higher quality content, with weekly or monthly scrapes of new stuff with expiry based on views... but that's how we get into 4AM over a engineering. Again.
I actually wonder sometimes how it's survived this long.
There are ... alternative methods. Fiddly, you have to roll your own, added frustration... but it could be done. Though I hope I never have to.
OTOH, it's a bit like hydra - cut one head off, three more appear. Until google fully locks down YouTube (and they might), there will always be wiggle room.
Honestly, I think they know that if they get too annoying, everyone will go elsewhere, so they are boiling the frog slowly. I'd bet Smarttube, Revanced, PipePipe etc are the Zion to YouTube's Matrix - allowed to exist as a pressure release valves.
I work in the medical field. All my it IT skills are self taught, starting way back with coding in BASIC in C64 and taking apart RC cars.
With enough interest and persistence, you can learn what you need to. IT skills are pretty democratic.
Self hosting stuff is a great gateway drug because it introduces...complications. The path between A and B always seems to take detours, which is where the learning happens.
It's interesting reading people talking about problem X, with everyone confidently advocating solution Y. I often find myself thinking "well, that's not been my experience. I would just do A".
It's good to see how other people solve similar problems. Eventually you'll arrive at that old homily "the way you do one thing is the way you do everything", which is useful too.
Ultimately, just.. start anywhere. Soon enough something will piss you off enough that you roll up your sleeves and work the problem - don't look, but you'll be learning those IT skills IRL without having to crack a textbook.
Well, the clear answer is Smart tube...but I think you might be talking about downloading and integrating into your media stack?
If so...doesn't Jellyfin have a plugin for TubeArchivist?
Protip:
If you use real-debride, it's basically a cloud cache. Meaning - after it fetches your stream / you finish watching it, it retains the download for you (30 days?) - or at least the index. So if you pop over to real-debride thereafter, you can download and store what you watched locally right quick.
There are tools that integrate the *arr stack to do just that...if you're looking to have your cake and eat it.
You're most welcome. I hope they're of some use to you.
There's part of me that thinks this is pure nostalgia bait - we grew up on the internet, we're middle-aged now, everything was better when we were young, shake fist at cloud.
OTOH, author isn't wrong. The mainstream net genuinely ain't what she used to be. The exact blame for that I don't know and it doesn't matter - we're in the shit now.
That's why niche sites like Lemmy, small web, RSS feeds etc are still so valuable. They're messy and human, like things used to be (tm). The trouble is finding them.
What I notice most is that I don't really search anymore; I use the internet like an appliance. "Want info about A, go to X. Want info about B, go to Y".
It's all horribly efficient. In fact, in a recent !privacy comment (on best search engines) I basically said "I don't really search any more. Search is shit. I use these tools instead"
https://aussie.zone/comment/24223554
So the author's point about use of AI tools is worth chewing on (what with Lemmy being famously anti-AI). I think we're now at the point where AI-assisted tools - self-hosted for me, thanks - are the best way to find those rabbit holes worth exploring. Even a small llm (Gemma-4-e4b) tied into good MCP tools can produce a really good "super Google, without the spam, find me X".
In fact, one of the main reasons I self host (yes, mine's solar powered) is that specifically.
https://aussie.zone/comment/24336560
OTOH, you could always mirror your own internet. With black jack. And hookers.
https://aussie.zone/comment/24257247
Ultimately though, I think smaller, more curated space (yes, like Lemmy and yes, please stop trying to turn it into the next Reddit) are going to be the last bastions of the old internet.
I was getting excited... until I read the price :/
$1200 USD.
Well, very on brand for Amiga to be $$$.
I think I'll wait for the TheA1200 or failing that, buy an old clunker and stick a PiStorm into it.
https://retrogames.biz/products/thea1200/
Yeah...this Circlus thing has a particular odor to it. Knew it was too good to be true but wanted to double check, as had not heard of it before. Thanks for confirming.
I think I will fork Simple LAN Chat and add what I want: https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat
It's server-less, which is one less thing to host. Text chat already works. The main problems are broken image/file transfer (literally craps itself with anything > 5kb in testing) and no useful notifications. So I will fix those, then probably add offline message queuing. The codebase is small and simple enough (he said, ominously) and if I don't scope creep, this should do the job nicely.
My kids are really into PictoCHAT on their DSes, so I'm thinking of it as something along those lines.
I want something that only works on the local WLAN, between vetted devices, and does not rely on Google accounts, FCM or other cloud middleware. I don't allow them unlimited access to the net / social media, so am engineering in house solutions. The base app here already keeps communication on the LAN, and I will add the device-vetting part. It looks like it's configured down to Android 5.1, so I can install it on old junkers without SIM cards, modern tablets, etc. That way the kids can play around with it (without doing something they shouldn't), take it camping (hotspot) etc. I'll need to reroll the Android APK. Could be a fun little project...
Aw crap, I may have awakened something in me....like hosting another bloody service the kids will use once and then just quit. No amount of my over-engineering can solve user apathy...so this time I'm investing less effort :)
Interestingly...the local brain found these
https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.usikkert.kouchat.android/
I still kinda wanna do the XMPP thing now...but I have a nagging suspicion I will be talking to myself or the clanker with it.
Nice! I use Redreader on my phone - and for some reason, it still actually works.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more...I'm doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It's probably relevant here too. Urgh...these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.
I've actually got to sit down today and do some coding..I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus...ain't nobody writing this shit for you.
👋👋
The reddit analogy may have been bad. What I meant was: there's usually a side door and it's usually simpler. You don't have to walk through the whole building to get to the room you want.
But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit....
https://redlib.catsarch.com/
https://github.com/complexlogic/flex-launcher
I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN... all to visit Reddit.
When the simple solution is Lemmy.
There's usually a 80/20 solution to these things and it shouldn't require a burner phone, cryptography and tradecraft.
I'm probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in "OK...shit's expensive...what's the MOST I can do with the LEAST?".
I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.
For example, I specced out a (very decent) "sneakernet" / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise...and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.
That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).
I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.
Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.
Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc...and I'm over here thinking "actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming".
Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools...none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU...and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?
Turns out...pretty fucking small.
Honesty, I don't think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear...hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on "sale" for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.
Personally, I'm building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system... and because I'm paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.
Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my "DVD as back up server" idea.
TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game...or at least, play it by your own rules.
What are these ads you speak of? 😎
Kidding aside...ya'll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I'm over here using software that just...doesn't serve ads. I think the most I've had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn't connect to the net, though media stick does).
That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just..stopped using them.
Now, when I visit my folks...yeah...holy shit...but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn't go overboard.
It's a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.
Can't speak to cutting edge options but will say when we went to Tokyo at start of year, I took the google Chromecast with TV (1080p version) + USB pass-thru + 128GB flashdrive.
The Chromecast had Nova player installed. I pointed it at the flashdrive and boom - instant media front end for the kids. Had to connect briefly to scrape images etc but after that was all off line.
That - plus smart tube - meant they could decompress after a day out and about.
That version of the Chromecast has been superseded (though can still buy on eBay).
Huh? The ABC app works perfectly fine on the google Chromecast with TV (the little white hockey puck one). Hell, it works fine on my $199 TCL (2GB) from OfficeWorks.
Or did you mean the generation before that (the one that looks like a fat USB stick), where you'd be casting from your phone?
Yep, that too. Though on one of my TVs (TCL), simply disabling the inbuilt 'startupwraith' seems to have the same effect