this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
64 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

50219 readers
562 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I went to https://selfh.st/ because someone posted a link to a github repo that had some tracking appended to the URL (?ref=selfh.st). OK your marketing worked on me I'm a mark.

I still have an aversion to this kind of tracking. Maybe considering how old-fashioned it it compared to the undetectable and nearly impossible to evade tracking methods currently deployed, that's wrong. Maybe this is just charming and quaint.

Disregarding the above, I liked the site enough to subscribe to their RSS feed https://selfh.st/rss/. Well that was pointless, as there is no content in the feed. Each entry like this:

Self-hosted news, updates, launches, and content for the week ending Friday, August 1, 2025

Continue reading on selfh.st...

I kind of expect a meaningful RSS feed these days. It sign of participating in the Libre internet.

Workaround: I have used Kill the Newsletter! (which kicks ass) to convert the email newsletter to an Atom feed which appears to work. Got the confirmation email, now need to wait for a post to be made.

What do you all think?

  1. Link tracking: yay or nay?

  2. Placeholder RSS: Rude or acceptable?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mouse@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The ?ref tag is from the Ghost blogging platform. https://forum.ghost.org/t/remove-ref-from-links-in-posts/37701/2

This is called “Outbound link tagging” - you can configure this on the Analytics Settings page (/ghost/#/settings/analytics)

And yeah, they do the same as GamingOnLinux with not including the content in the RSS feeds.

Forgot to give my opinion. The ref tag doesn't bother me because it's not giving any private information up, besides where I am from just like the referrer header does. I am kind of conflicted with the RSS feeds because I personally use them for many things, however I understand that these places need to advertise to make money (though I block ads too).

[–] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

I'm sure a lot (the majority) of people who are interested in selfhosting block ads. Need a different business model.

On the other hand a lot of people interested in selfhosting appear to have cash to throw around on their hobby. Might be better to