I’m self hosting on an old laptop, and I’m a convert for life. Self-hosting is amazing. Looking for other people’s weirdest examples of what they’re doing as inspiration.
My example, I recently set up a grammar script, where I have a couple 8b LLMs and an html landing page. I upload a doc and it corrects grammar and highlights changes it made, or just proofreads and I make changes manually. I can upload a novel before bed, and have suggestions based on specific writing styles in the morning. All local, perfectly suited for my own work.
so, I’m self hosting for many years, with many many tools that i tried out and a couple that stuck.
not sure if this counts as weird, but I guess the most fitting example is the following:
i have a matrix server, which basically only a few relatives use to communicate with me, but I make heavy use of the bridges, so i don’t need to run those shit apps like Whatsapp on my phone.
anyway, i really dislike voice messages, because most of the time i read messages at the computer or in the tram and i don’t want to get headphones out, or simply don’t want to listen to five minutes of car noise to get the information off the words. so when my next productive episode comes I’m planning to set up a matrix bot that sends those audio files to some stt engine and returns a transcript to the chat. I’ll set up the bridge to ignore this bot, so the whatsnot user doesn’t get spammed.
Doesn’t the bridge require you to run whatsapp on a phone anyway?
yeah, Whatsapp really stinks in this regard. i have it in an isolated environment on my phone (called shelter), where it is frozen most of the time. you need to switch it on once every two weeks, and the bridge will tell you when.
at some point I’ll dump it on a phone which is just in a drawer at home, together with all the other BS apps.
i tried waydroid as alternative, but somehow didn’t really make it work (didn’t put much effort into it though)
If you manage to make an account on WhatsApp and move it to waydroid, they’ll ban you.
Meta’s game is (meta)data collection and selling your data. They’ll delete your account if they can’t get all your phone’s data (eg if it’s an emulator then they can’t uniquely identify you)
the app doesn’t have access to any of my phones data now. it runs in an isolated environment once every two weeks for about a minute, otherwise I’m only using their web API. so they might ban me, but yeah, it’s not that i would care much ;)
It has access to your phone’s fingerprint, which is then linked to all your other activity that you do on the phone, because it has the same fingerprint.
It doesn’t need access to the phone data. All it needs is the fingerprint.