In so many ways, privacy is dead—or at least a lot more challenging to maintain than it used to be. In public, you’re probably seen by dozens of cameras every day just as you go about your business. At home, almost everything we do online—from social media posts to the shows we watch on our screens—is tracked, packaged, and sold. The apps we use are some of the worst offenders—especially if they’re free to use, which just means you’re paying either with your eyeballs (on advertisements) or with the data the app is hoovering up and selling off.
The problem is simple: We don’t own or control the apps we use. But you can change that, to an extent. There’s a growing list of “self-hosted” alternatives to commonly used apps. A self-hosted app is just what it sounds like: Instead of relying on a third party’s servers for an app’s functionality, you host your own server. That means you control all your data, and your privacy score shoots up exponentially. It’s understandable that “running your own server” might sound intimidating, but it’s often a lot easier than it sounds. Here’s how self-hosted apps work, and which ones you can start using today to give your online privacy a boost.
How self-hosted apps work
The standard apps we use every day—provided by companies like Google or X—are extremely convenient. You can get them up and running in minutes, and they usually work pretty seamlessly. The downside is the mountain of your private data that they absorb and use in mysterious ways. Even if it’s anonymized, it’s still disconcerting—and since those companies can change their terms of service (ToS) any time they want, there’s no guarantee how your data will be used in the future. A self-hosted app makes everything local. You provide your own storage and your own functionality, and only you can decide how your data is used.
The benefits are obvious. Control over your data and privacy is number one. There’s also potentially lower cost (since you’re not paying a subscription), and you won’t be subject to the whims of a corporation that might decide to discontinue an app you love or force you to upgrade. Plus, you can decide the features and add-ons you want to use instead of having unwanted features forced on you.
Downsides of self-hosting
There are some potential downsides, too, of course. Self-hosting means you’re responsible for security and keeping your software updated. Hardware can fail, and if you don’t have a recent backup of your data there’s no one to turn to. You’re also your own customer service, and your tech support is essentially a Google search.
What do you think so far?
And going self-hosted can sometimes be a bit of a lift; some self-hosted apps require containerization environments like Docker or Homebrew, which makes it easy for software to run on any computer without having to worry about software dependencies or conflicting libraries (if that sentence meant nothing to you, keep reading, it’s not that bad).
Another barrier is hardware: Depending on what you want to self-host, you might need a lot of storage. Movies and TV shows can be enormous media files requiring gigabytes (or even terabytes) of storage, and one of the things you have to handle yourself when you self-host is backing everything up. That means a robust self-hosted setup might require a few extra hard drives (or a Virtual Personal Server—a VPS—which costs money) and possibly a cloud backup solution.
Apps you might want to self-host
But we can keep it simple: Many self-hosted apps also offer pre-packaged applications that can be easily installed on your computer like any other piece of software. And you can self-host on your everyday desktop computer, or turn an old desktop or laptop into your personal server. If you want to see if self-hosting apps works for you, you can start by just installing one of the following self-hosted alternatives to popular apps on your current computer.
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Plex. Plex is one of the best-known and most robust self-hosted solution out there. Plex is essentially your own private media server for streaming photos, audio, and video files to devices—like a self-hosted Netflix using films, TV shows, and music that you own. You can install the Plex App on a Roku device and direct it to your personal media server to stream anything you want, and give friends and family access to your server as well if you want. Plex also offers a paid service to access your media remotely—i.e., when you’re not home.
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Kodi. Similar to Plex, Kodi turns your PC’s hard drive into a media server. Unlike Plex, Kodi is open source software and not controlled by a single company, which makes a better choice for privacy. After installing it, you point it to the folders where you store videos and audio, and then Kodi streams those files over your wifi network to other devices. For example, I use Kodi at home to stream all my music files to devices using VLC. It’s a lightweight and simple way to self-host your media. If you want to just stream for yourself, Kodi is a lot simpler than Plex to set up and run.
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Jellyfin. Another media server alternative, Jellyfin is a little more complicated to set up, but it offers a free and open source alternative to Plex with a richer feature set than Kodi. If you really want total mastery of your streaming libraries without any third parties involved, Jellyfin might be your best choice.
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Grocy. If you’re using apps like Plan to Eat to organize your pantry and meal plan, Grocy offers the same functionality without the subscription fee or the third-party data vacuum. A full Grocy installation involves setting up your own server using Docker, but Grocy Desktop is an easier solution that installs like any other piece of software on your PC. Grocy lets you track purchases, track supplies in the house, automate shopping lists, track expiration dates, and incorporate recipes so you can see at a glance what you need to make dinner.
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Mastodon. If you’re leery of social media’s privacy implications—since you typically don’t own or control your own posts or audience data—there’s a self-hosted alternative: Mastodon. Mastodon received a lot of attention a few years ago, and it’s still chugging along. You can set up a Mastodon account just like any of the “Twitter-like” platforms out there, but Mastodon can also be self-hosted, meaning you can run your own social media platform with your own rules. Users on different servers can follow each other, too, so you’re not limited to just your friends or colleagues—Threads has been making an effort to integrate into the network as well.
Setting up a Mastodon server can get a little complicated—you’ll need your own domain, a VPS, and an email provider specific to the server. But if you want true social media privacy, this is the way.
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Owncast. If you want to stream video out to the world like the folks on Twitch and YouTube do, Owncast is a self-hosted video streaming platform that keeps all your data and media under your control. That means you can never be de-platformed if YouTube decides you’ve violated some mysterious policy or someone else’s dubious copyright claim, for example.
Owncast can be installed easily on cloud hosts like DigitalOcean if you’re willing to pay for that service, but you can run it locally as well (keeping in mind that video streaming requires a lot of storage and bandwidth). It can be installed locally pretty easily on Linux systems, but requires Docker for Windows or Homebrew for macOS.
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Immich. Google Photos is a great tool, but it does mean that your private, personal photos are stored on a corporation’s servers under their terms of service, and if you’re not careful you’ll quickly eat up the free storage and have to start paying for extra room. Enter Immich, a self-hosted alternative. It requires Docker to install, but is pretty easy to set up and uses web- or mobile-based interfaces to administer. Its feature set is very robust, including automated backups, facial recognition, and easy sharing with other folks.
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Home Assistant. If you’ve got smart devices in your home, Home Assistant offers a centralized control hub that avoids the poor security and privacy nightmares of third-party Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. It works with most open-source and proprietary smart home devices, and offers a level of customization that rivals any paid offering.
While you can set up Home Assistant on a computer to run yourself, by far the easiest way to use it is to purchase the Home Assistant Green, a pre-built device that makes it a “plug and play” experience. The Home Assistant Green just plugs into your network and is ready to go. Otherwise it’s most commonly installed on a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi or on a traditional PC using Docker or a virtual machine.
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Ollama. Do you use AI large language models (LLMs) like the ones powering ChatGPT, but you don’t like the fact that your chats are exposed? Ollama let’s you install lightweight versions of LLMs like gpt-oss locally on your computer and run them. The experience is very similar to using the web-based LLM tools, though they can be slower and less powerful than the full versions depending on your hardware. But if privacy is your goal, it’s an option, and Ollama offers easy installation of several different AI models to play around with.