Self-hosting sucks, yes. But I'll be damned if it isn't fun. It's definitely not for everyone. Not only is it not for everyone, but it is not for everyone's families. I'm so grateful that my wife is willing to put up with me experimenting on our home network, trying out different apps, waiting for me to resolve a DNS issue because I forgot to assign a static IP to my pihole.

I feel like it sucks a lot less than it used to. New apps like Immich work incredibly well, new tools like Tailscale make security and access to the home network easy, and LLMs make solving problems and getting ideas a lot easier.