Last winter I moved family photos off Google Photos to Immich on an old Dell Optiplex 7040 in the closet (Proxmox, Immich, Nextcloud, Matrix). Main reason was Google One kept getting more expensive.
Tech part works. Immich is great, Nextcloud is fine.
People part doesn’t. My wife uses it because she has to, but she still brings up January when I almost lost a month of kid photos due to no real backup. My sister is still on Messenger, my mom is on iCloud, so my Matrix server is mostly just me and wife.
I have backup now (USB + B2) and cost is lower than Google One, but time cost is higher and family adoption is low.
For those who self-host for family — how did you actually get them to switch and stick? Did you force it, make it invisible, bribe with something, or just accept that they will stay on Google / Messenger / iCloud?
What worked for you with non-technical family?
Accept and move on. Those that want to use it will. Others won’t. Cost isn’t everything.
- Make it cheaper
- Make it better
- Use your network admin powers to force adoption by blocking everything else. /s
Reality is that it’s hard to compete against big tech on convenience, features, and ease.
The only sure way to have people use self-hosted services is to make it cheaper (which is irrelevant if they don’t personally pay the bill) or for those people to believe in it ideologically, in the same way you presumably do. To value data ownership, and privacy.
Selfhosting is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most people don’t care and don’t want to care. But for true adoption, you have to care about it for reasons which are beyond the purely practical.
As one of the family members - its not ready for most people who want shit to just work. Too janky finicky whatever. If you try and force it they will just pretend to use it.
You’re not going to be able to force people to use it. Most won’t. You’ll need to get over that. As long as they know it’s there. Those who want to use it do. The only one I really push is backups, I’ll host secure backups for them, but honestly it’s more for my own benefit so when they ask me to fix their computer because they lost all their data I know it’s there, and things like family movies.
Gotta make it easier than the alternative
This is the answer My boomer parents taught me how to use computers and rely on them in their everyday lives
Yet, the actual literacy they used to have is basically atrophied by the smart phones, tablets, and worst of all the walled garden set top boxes or “TV sticks” that are just plug and play to them
They don’t care that the tech is getting worse or taking more from them in terms of privacy and owning their purchases or software, it’s just easier for them to use and constantly churning out slop to capture their attention
I’ve had this itch to get my own mini PC and set it up for them to use things like Jellyfin or Kodi but I’m going to have to wait and see if they even care, it’s likely just not for them
I somewhat envy you. My family does not want even to use the non-selfhosted ones: icloud, onedrive, etc.
I handle problems like photo storage when they need it, but don’t want the preventive measures for data loss, storage space, etc :(
If you keep fixing their stupid mistakes, they’ll never learn. If people insist on being stupid, let them deal with the consequences.
dealt with tis with my husband. He doesnt use any of the stuff i put together. I had a talk with him and he admitted that he was happy i was playing around, but none of the things i was “fixing” were broken in his eyes. For eample i put together mealie for recipes and to him that wasnt any different than the recipe books he normally uses, or his head.
What he did want though, was a way to share his commissions with his clients. But he hated nextcloud because he was always having syncing issues. So ater talking with him i set up a samba share to my server that he could drag his commissions to. That golder rclones to nextcloud. Its not what i want, but he doesnt have syncing problems and hes more than happy with it.
I set up immich and he never used it. He just preferred manually browsing the photo directory. So i use immich and he manually looks at things.
We eventually came to an agreement, i work on the stuff i want to work on, and if it would affect him he and i talk about what would work for him, and i work around that requirement. It makes the project into a fun problem to solve and he actually uses the thing in the end.
No amount of “but this is better” would shake him because it doesnt feel natural to him
It was nice to read how you met your husband where he was at in regard to getting him to use these things. You two sound like a good match :3
You can’t. You can’t make people like something just because you’ve discovered that it’s amazing.
My wife is a technophobe and makes a point of commenting on any time my selfhosted stuff doesn’t work right (even though it’s unrelated to my server, like our ISP shitting itself).
I’ve personally installed and logged into Jellyfin on all of my mother’s and wife’s devices and neither of them uses it and both go back to Netflix (with ads!).
My parents won’t use Signal and dont see the point of installing another app besides WhatsApp.
I’ve Ihad to install firefox+adblock on my father’s laptop and replace the desktop icon with an edge icon to get him to use it.
Even my brothers (who are as tech savvy as me) would not de-Google or start self-hosting after a year of me telling them how awesome it is, until they eventually discovered it for themselves.
You can’t make people. Tell them about it, introduce the idea and demo it. That’s all you can do.
If people are happy to pay the ever rising prices for services that keep getting worse and more intrusive, there’s little you can do. I’d concentrate on getting my own stuff sorted out.
Your don’t. Most FOSS is missing features and not as easy to use.
Its not for them. Its all for me.
The service you provide has to be reliable and better than big tech. Sometimes that’s simply not going to be possible. Chat apps are going to be the hardest. Immich should be easy, it is legitimately better than Google photos
This guy is an LLM bot, his post in the self-hosting forum got locked because of it.
Do you have an proof?
They deleted the post. Here are the comments they made to the replies on the post and I’ll let you decide.
You are right, it should be automatic — and now it is, but in January it wasn’t. My mistake in January: I had Immich running and thought “I have a copy on the Optiplex, so it’s backed up”. It wasn’t. No 3-2-1, just one HDD. Now it’s automatic and boring, which is what I wanted: Daily: Immich DB dump + rclone sync to external USB (kept in same closet but different disk). Weekly: rclone sync encrypted to B2 — about $6/mo vs $15+ for Google One family. Monthly: I test restore of one random photo from B2, just to be sure. It’s 2 cron jobs in Proxmox host, not inside LXC, so it runs even if LXC is down. Took 30 min to set up once. Heat is harder, yes. My fixes that actually helped: BIOS power limit to 35W, undervolt -50mV — temps down 8-10C, still fine for Immich. Immich machine learning (face recognition) only runs 02:00-06:00 via cron, not all day. Cut a small vent at top of closet door + USB fan pulling air out, wife stopped complaining. Happy to share docker-compose if you want — it’s just Immich + Nextcloud + postgres + redis, nothing fancy.
Another reply to a comment:
Thanks, solid points. AC — you are right, but the heat is only in the closet, not bedroom. Closet door is usually closed, bedroom itself is fine. AC for the closet would be overkill, I just vented it. Downclock — already did, BIOS limit 35W and -50mV undervolt, plus ML only 02:00-06:00. That dropped 8-10C and it’s still enough for Immich. Monitoring — good call. Right now I have simple cron + healthchecks.io ping that emails me if backup is older than 2 days. LGM (Loki, Grafana, Mimir) is great but feels heavy for one Optiplex in a closet. I’m looking at Uptime Kuma with email to wife + me if backup job fails — simple dashboard she can actually open. “Document everything in case you die” — 100% agree, this is my current task. Writing a 1-page README for wife: where files are, how to get plain JPGs from Immich without Docker, B2 credentials in Bitwarden. That’s more important than any stack. Appreciate the checklist.
And finally:
That’s a brilliant setup — mutual offsite backup with parents. I love that you help them with Pi-hole + security and get offsite in return, everyone wins. Way better than my lonely USB in the same closet. For heat your split is smart too — low power always-on for photos and heavy stuff only spins up when accessed. I might steal the parents idea, my mom has fiber and would benefit from Pi-hole anyway. Thanks for sharing!
So no, I don’t have proof. But those comments smell of AI.
Proof enough for me.
I can access the now deleted post from my own instance. OP is very likely an LLM.
Thanks for reporting. I’ll be banning the OP now.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world would be a great place to post this. It’s quite active by Lemmy standards.
