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.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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I want to like audiobookshelf, but my main go to podcast series has 945 episodes totalling about 44GB.
The app is next to useless for this podcast as it takes almost 30 seconds just to load the series in the library and won't even play an episode in the Android app. On desktop it takes another >50seconds to even start playing. Poorly optimized app, hope it gets better, but I'm actively looking for other options.
I was using Podgrab, but it's basically not maintained at all. There's a whole set of podcasts that aren't accessible because the useragent string hasn't been updated and other issues that have gathered. I'd consider it a dead project, which sucks, it was simple and worked. There have been some forks, but I seem to remember issues with them as well and they also appear dead.
I used to use GPodder before that. Don't quite recall why I moved away (probably because it was more a desktop application than a service). Might have to give it a go again.
There's another recent project PodFetch that's been self-promoting in the issues sections of other projects, but it seemed young and not in a useable state when I tried it.
I too want to like Audiobookshelf but for my collection, it's been very unstable and unreliable.
As an avid podcast listener I use Pocket Casts. But I have been looking for something to replace this, especially to own my listening status and save favourite episodes.
Either I haven't tried it properly enough or there simply isn't anything out there.
My experiences:
Podfetch: Very very basic, can't get Favourites to work, doesn't save specific episodes into a permanent archive, couldn't get playing to work, no mobile apps
Plex: Cancelled Podcast support two years ago
Audiobookshelf: As described by others, performance issues (I have ~117 podcasts and updating takes ages), iOS app is Testflight only and BETA is full. Wanted retest with it being only an intermediary.
just type "podcast" into the search box, press enter on the keyboard
Wow, you're so smart, I wrote such things on the Internet when your parents hadn't met yet.
lol, what a poor attempt at an insult