If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done.
Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.
Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)
That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to.
So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice what to share, picture by picture, with default "off". And have no dark patterns trying to catch a finger accidentally hitting a "back up to cloud" for the full album.
That, to me, is a big deal, worth dealing with occasional IT hassles for. Which is just a personal preference.
Sure it could be easier/safer to manage, everything can be better.
Over the last couple of years hosting it I had a single issue with an upgrade but that was because I simply ignore the upgrade instructions and YOLOed the docker compose update.
Again, is it perfect? No. Would I expect a non tech savy user to manage their own instance? Again no.
pixelfed may be what the parent want then. I don't like that it is PHP, but as long as they adhere to the ActPub protocal, we can roll our own in whatever flavor.
Upgrades are frequent but no hassle.
I have been running this for half a year. It might have been more work earlier?
My household is using this for our shared photos repository and everyone can use it. Even the kids.
There is both direct web access and an iPhone app.
Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate the DOM after it loaded.
It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.
> Stop self hosting.
Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want to get going and don't have resources for this.
Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to some other shop software requires a lot of manual work, and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1.
Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will require a person who can google and knows a little stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem that will come up will have been solved in some StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue.
Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems. Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or shutting down vital features in their software, happens regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.
I think it's the best of every world. Self contained, with an install script. Can bring up every dependent service needed all in one command. Even your example of "a simple script" has 5 different expectations.
Also have you read some of the setup instructions for some of these things? I'd be churning out 1000 lines of ansible crap.
Either way since Proxmox 9.1 has added at least initial support for docker based containers the whole argument's out the window anyway.
Of course, you may have reasons to do that. But then you also own the maintenance.
I have never had to maintain any PG extensions. Whatever they put in the image, I just run. And so far it has just worked. Upgrades are frequent and nothing has broken on upgrade - yet at least
I totally disagree. You do need a tiny bit of command line experience to install and update it (nothing more than using a text editor and running `docker compose up`), but that's really it. All administration happens from the web UI after that. I've been using Immich for at least 2 years and I've never had to manually do something other than an update.
> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Photos for others.
Honestly, I can't understand what exactly you're expecting. If Google Photos suits your needs for sharing photos with others, that's great! As for Immich, have you read how it started[0]? I think it's solved the problem amazingly well and it still stays true to its initial ambitions.
[0]: https://v1.142.1.archive.immich.app/docs/overview/welcome
Immich may not be the pinnacle of all software development, but with the alternative being Google photos:
- Uploading too many photos won't clog my email and vice versa
- I'm not afraid of getting locked out of my photo account for unclear reasons and being unable to reach anyone to regain access
- If I upload family photos from the beach, then my account won't get automatically flagged/disabled for whatever
- Backups are trivially easy compared to Google takeout
- The devs are reachable and responsive. Encounter a problem? You'll at least reach a human being instead of getting stranded with a useless non-support forum
I would instead say that my (and my family's) photos are too important to me to pass their hosting on to a company known for its arbitrary decisions and then being an impenetrable labyrinth if there is an issue.
So you do pay some price, but it is an illusion to think that the price of Google photos (be that in cash, your data or your effort) is much lower.
Things that did break during this time: - my hacky remote filesystem - network connectivity of a too cheap server but these were on me and my stinginess.
On the other hand, maybe AI can help remove some of that pain for me now. Just have Claude figure out what's wrong. (Until it decides to hallucinate something, and makes things worse)
These things are a proxmox home lab user's lifeline. My only complaint is that you have to change your default host shell to bash to run them. You only have to do that for the initial container creation though.
Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer and certainly cheaper than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their effort to save a few bucks. It wasn’t even the plugins, but the instance underlying the shared hosting.
> It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.
You’re also locked into an ecosystem. It’s called Stripe or PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway. Don’t forget that significant amount of customizations are restricted to streamline PCI compliance, you can do illegal things very easily. Install an analytics script that accidentally captures their credit card numbers, and suddenly you’re in hot water.
> Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging
Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging, if it’s cheaper than an engineer to properly support a self-hosted solution, I’ll still make that trade as even $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it. If you’re at the scale where you don’t have a proper engineer to manage it, do not self host. Business downtime is always more expensive than software (in this case, 5 salaries for 2 weeks to do absolutely nothing + lost donations + reputational damage + customer damages, because “self hosting is easy and cheaper”).