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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/

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.

• Avoid stupid people.
• Avoid people doing stupid things.
• Avoid stupid places.
• Avoid stupid times.

This is my final reply in this thread. The developer has said their piece, and I have said mine. Now you’ve waded in - so let me set the record straight.

I am a developer. I had genuine interest in this project. I read the Hister documentation and inspected parts of the repository because the documentation did not clearly answer several basic questions I had:

• How SQLite, Bleve, and stored HTML relate.

• Whether TTL or storage quotas exist.

• How browser-history deletion affects stored data.

• How previews differ from a real web archive.

• What multi-user isolation actually covers.

Yes, I used AI to assemble a plain-language summary and labelled it accordingly. Not everyone keeps the Hister codebase in their head, not everyone talks in code review and if I had these questions, I’m willing to bet others did too. The AI wrote for a lay audience because I didn’t ask it to do QA, I asked it to ELI-5.

The summary contained errors. Fine. That’s AI for you. However, if neither I nor the AI could find clear answers after cloning the repo, that supports my point about opacity.

At no point did I request a line-by-line audit. “Points 2 and 5 are wrong” would have answered the question.

Declining would also have been reasonable. Hell, side stepping it would have been fine too. Instead the dev decided to note the inaccuracies and rudely brush them off.

Both you and the dev seem to be under the impression !selfhosted is a one way distribution channel.

The developer came here, invited questions, then turned the raw prawn when questions arrived.

I didn’t go to their their Github. I didn’t abuse them. I genuinely wanted to know more about their project and share it, perhaps even work to help improve it.

They - and now you, ostensibly a happy clapper for Hister - came here.

Your claims about my effort and intent are assumptions followed by personal abuse.

Try and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before calling them low effort and shitty next time.

That is not what happened.

I fed your GitHub repository to a clanker because the documentation did not answer my questions. I then shared its summary here.

You replied afterwards and said the summary was wrong. Fair enough. I then asked which specific points were wrong.

You could have answered, declined, or ignored the post.

Instead, you deigned only to dismiss the effort, then blamed me for objecting.

You also asked which parts were confusing, although my previous reply had already listed those issues.

You did not address them then, either.

A prospective user should not need ChatGPT, a cloned repository, and several follow-up questions to understand key functions.

You invited feedback. Your documentation remains unclear on several points, including issues beyond those I listed.

Your responses show that further feedback is not worth my time.

I am happy to narrow it further.

I took the time to read the documentation, ask ChatGPT to summarise what I found, and then reduced my follow-up to a simple request:

«Which of points 1–7 are materially wrong?»

That is not the same as asking you to audit “multiple screens” of AI output.

If the answer is “2 and 5 are incorrect”, or even “I do not have time to review it”, that is perfectly fine.

However, dismissing it as “a multiple screens long AI prompt” does not only not answer the question, it comes off as abrasive.

As for the documentation, the confusing parts are exactly those I listed: retention, lifecycle management, browser ingestion, storage limits, deletion, multi-user behaviour, and, most importantly, what Hister actually is and who it is for.

What’s disappointing is not that you disagreed with the AI summary. AIs are idiots.

It that after inviting questions and feedback, your response to a genuine attempt to understand the project is curt dismissal.

The inner workings of Hister may be obvious to you; they are not obvious to others.

The point is that you came here specifically to invite questions and feedback.

“TL;DR” does not encourage the sort of community engagement you ostensibly came here to seek.

Excellent - thanks for clearing that up.

Is there a TTL / max database size per user setting? Say I have 4 users using the server; can I allocate a hard limit of 10GB per user, with 180 day retention rules?

Additionally, is the other parenthetical information materially correct? If not, which points [1 thru to 7] are wrong?

I would like to further recommend it but your documentation is somewhat confusing at first blush.

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Its a simplied front end for people to request shows / movies. Normies find Radarr / Sonarr somewhat perplexing.

https://github.com/Ombi-app/Ombi

You never cease to amaze me, irmadlad.

I think I’m going to put a declarations.md that says something like “I made this for me, but I’m sharing it with the world. If you find it useful, use it and let me know! If you find issues, submit request and I’ll look but no promises. And if you want feature X … fork it and build it. The code’s yours, with my blessings. PS: I don’t accept PRs, sorry”.

I code for fun; I’m not looking for a third unpaid job. That’s what parenting is for.

Please tell me that’s ai slop parody.

I mean…it has to be. And the fact YouTube is just merrily injecting it into their streams is amazing.

I use Smartube and PipePipe and haven’t seen ads on YT since forever. Is this really what it’s like now?

Interesting question. If you are asking for an LLM (that is self-hosted and can do that?), you’re going to need to provide some significant tooling, like rag / documentation, troubleshooting, sort out concurrency, front end etc. Honestly…it just easier to point them at a YouTube (network chuck has good stuff).

It absolutely can be done and it absolutely can be valuable - for you personally. But if they’re having trouble doing basic things like installing jelly fin, they have zero chance of doing something like that themselves.

Honestly, I think your easiest option for your non-technical friends is just to point them at one of the cloud providers, like chatGPT or Claude.

OTOH, how much work are you willing to put into this and what’s your GPU / LLM set up like? There

Your basic foot in door starting point is going to be installing and provisioning OpenWebui, getting a good local model up and running (Qwen3.6-35B or Qwen3.6-27B) and creating a “Knowledge Base” in OWUI with requisite documentation. You’ll need to set up tailscale / headscale so they can access your OWUI instance from their homes, too.

If you’re serious about this, write back and I’ll thumbnail sketch it out for you. It’s a good project and I’ve done similar. There are real complexities to something like this beyond just “install ollama, lol done”.

Brilliant!

How does it go for chewing thru the phone battery tho?