2025 has been a lot for most of us. The world isn’t going in the right direction, with democracy being on the retreat all over the world, and the effects of global warming becoming more and more evident. There are a lot I can’t control, but I can do something about where I store my data and spend my digital time.
Tech wise, 2025 has for me been about becoming less dependent on big tech and its tech oligarchs, improving privacy and get more control of my own data. In short: Self host or use SAAS on European grounds as the US is going down the drains.
I will start with an overview of all my new services, and continue with writing a bit on my thoughts on them and why there were chosen.
| Type of service | Hosting | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Proton | Moved from Fastmail to Proton. | |
| Passwords | Proton | Moved from LastPass |
| VPN | Proton | Moved from ExpressVPN |
| TOTP 2FA | Proton | Moved from Google Authenticator |
| Calendar | Proton | Moved from Google |
| Audiobooks | Audiobookshelf (home server) | Moved from several smaller services |
| Podcast | PinePods (Hetzner) and AntennaPod (Android) | Moved from Pocket Casts |
| Pictures | Immich (PikaPods) | Moving from Google Photos (not finished) |
| Documents/files | Nextclound (Hetzner) | Moved from Google Drive |
| RSS | FreshRSS (PikaPods) | I got back to RSS in 2025 |
| Git | Forgejo (PikaPods) | Moved from Github and Gitlab |
| News Archive | Wallabag (PikaPods) | I used Pocket in the old days, but got back to this type of service in 2025 |
| Web statistics | Umami (PikaPods) | Moved from Google Analytics |
In addition, I am a heavy user of Plex and Jellyfin. I mostly love Plex, but Jellyfin is open source, handles hardware accelerated transcoding better and Findroid (Android) handles subtitles for downloaded material (in contrast to the official Jellyfin app or Plex for Android). I still buy a lot of BluRay and DVDs for anything I want to be in control of for the rest of my life. They are all ripped and stored on a NAS with RAID.
Hetzner and PikaPods
I have been using Linode for years, and have been happy with them, But they are US based, and now owned by Akamai. Hetzner is German, cheap and have been great to use so far. I plan to move most of my VMs from Linode to Hetzner.
In 2025 I also discovered PikaPods who offers hosting for many open source projects. They are located in Malta (EU), and hosts their services on Hetzner. My experience so far has been very positive.
Proton
I have been using Fastmail for many years, and have been one happy bunny for all other reasons than where it is hosted. It is fast, with no hiccups, uncluttered interface and just handles mail very very well. Moving from Fastmail is not an easy one for me, but they are hosted in the US with US staff. The company is Australian, which isn’t the best privacy wise either. Keeping my most important service in the US is just not an option any more.
After much considerations I ended up with Proton Mail. They are European (in Switzerland, although they seem to be moving some services to the EU), and are extremely privacy focused. The interface is really good, better than the alternatives I looked at, and they have good apps. The down side is that I have to use their Android app as they do not offer IMAP on mobile. You can install an IMAP proxy on Windows, Mac and Linux, though.
Proton also offers a calendar, one of the other central things I looked for, which is good to have on the same service as my email, When they also offered an alternative for LastPass, Google Authenticator and ExpressVPN, it became my number one choice. Just before new year, I moved my main domain over to Proton. With a family subscription, my wife and son are also moving over soon.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud has been another big one for me. I have been using Google Drive quite a bit, and the integrated office tools has been great. Hosted Nextcloud is offered by multiple companies (go to Nexcloud’s home page for links to providers).
For me it was important with Collabora Office, and not all offers that with Nextcloud. But the ones that did were not the cheapest. I didn’t want to self host the main Nextcloud installation (too important for the time I have to be on top of security). I ended up with Hetzner for Nexcloud as they are dead cheap with a large disk quota. But I self host Collabora Office (CODE) on Hetzner with docker which is integrated with Nextcloud. This works great! Collabora Office Online has become really, rellay good! My only down side is that editing documents on Android hasn’t worked well for me. I hope this improves in the future as this is something I used to use a lot on Google Drive.
Audiobookshelf
Audiobookshelf was a new one to me, and was easy to install back in August. I host this on a VM at home with a read only mounted network disk from my NAS. Audiobookshelf also offers Podcast handling, but I don’t want to mix those two in the same app, so I have only been using it for audiobooks.I have been using this a lot (on my personal scale). I have nothing negative to say, and have been very happy with it!
On a side note: I buy my DRM free Norwegian audio books at Ark and Norli, and my English books at Libro.fm.
PinePods
PinePods was installed late in the year. It is a Rust based project that offers a gPodder compatible backend and a web front end. It can also sync to an external gPodder backend if you already use something like oPodSync. It also offers desktop and mobile apps, but I will mainly use the web front end and AntennaPod on Android.
I used to use Pocket Casts, which I really liked, but the owner went crazy during the year, so I wanted to rely on something else. I used Antennapod without a backend for a few months and was happy with that. Then I set up a gPodder compatible backend on Nextcloud with plugin, and that worked OK, but this setup is much better.
Immich
Immich was installed early in 2025 with PikaPods. It has been a really nice experience so far. It works very well, and the search function with local object recognition has been working surprisingly well.The only reason I haven’t deleted my pictures on Google Photo yet, is that I haven’t found a good way to backup the images. I can reach the raw files from the installation, but I want a nicer download with the original file names etc, and I want them synced to my NAS on a daily basis. I have seen python scripts, but haven’t had time to look into it yet. I hope to get that under control in 2026.
FreshRSS
2025 was the year I went back to RSS. I want to follow news sources outside of social media streams (decentralization is good for democracy as someone else does not choose what I should read). One thing is the larger news channels which I visit daily. But not all sites updates daily, especially private blogs. I now check in on FreshRSS daily (hosted with PikaPods).
Forgejo
With all the AI nonsense going on at Github, and as they are owned by Microsoft and hosted on US ground, I wanted an alternative. I have also been using Gitlab. Gitlab offers self hosting, but it is not the easiest to host.
PikaPods offers Forgejo. The one clear down side is that Forgejo on PikaPods does not work with SSH, and I have to rely on HTTPS. That is not ideal, but it works. Self hosting it with docker should not be too hard to set up either.
Forgejo aims to integrate ActivityPub so they can support likes, pull requests etc between hosts. It will take a while before that is ready, but I really like what they aim for. Forgejo is super fast and works very well.
A word on social media
I haven’t been hosting anything for social media. But I have been trying to move to decentralized services. I ditched Twitter before it was renamed to X as it had already started to go up in flames. Facebook has been harder to drop as many of my interest groups are there and it is the one place were I can get in touch with old friends and family. But it is very clear that we need something else than feeds controlled by a large entity that always ends up becoming horrible.
Mastodon is the best alternative for X in my opinion. Bluesky offers a distributed architecture, but in reality it is quite centralized so far. As a company controls the standard too, I think it will be only a matter of time before that becomes a pile of flames too.Mastodon is truly decentralized and based on the AcitivityPub protocol.
Pixelfed offers to the decentralized world of ActivityPub what Instagram does in its closed ecosystem, and I have been using that quite a bit too. More on these services in a later post.
Summary
I will continue to work for self hosting and services on European grounds in 2026. Big tech has gone in the wrong direction for a long time, and hosting in the US is getting a real problem now as the sitting president is doing his best to build down the democracy. I hope for a better year in 2026.
