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:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Essential
Nice to Have
drm free isn't really something you can guarantee unless you're fine with some games simply not being available on your platform. Some devs insist on it, and if you require drm free, they won't sell on your platform.
Personally, I prefer drm free, but if a platform only has it, and the game I want thus isn't there, I won't use it.
cloud saves is nice, but with decentralized solution that gets harder to do. who is "the cloud"?
Remote mounting of storage and being able to run games directly from the remote server would save a lot on local storage space.
Bandwidth to storage is going to become more and more important so I'm not keen on that.
It would be an optional feature.
How remote? Like inside my own network or across the internet?
The latter
Full Linux proton support for entire library.
An easy donate button that gives the game devs money directly and uncut.
I'm not really sure how a decentralized storefront would work? Where would the game files be hosted? Do you mean like a federated solution, that shares the encrypted game files around per instance? Or true decentralization where there's p2p hosting, with the devs having to run their own hosting originally before players pick up the game? The former I could see working, the latter not so much (smaller devs often don't have a 24/7 server to run for this sort of thing).
In terms of gui/client, I wouldn't mind one that let's me manage my games and isn't "locked down" to a particular company. For instance I have both steam and epic games launchers, why can't I just have one launcher that works with both storefronts?
In terms of features I want for a library/store client? Options to easily access the game's install folder. Mod manager if applicable. I'd like an auto-update feature. It'd be nice to have crypto payment options (not as required, but optionally if devs/customers wish to use). I'd like it to be able to track games outside of the storefront. For instance, so I can log what switch games I own (even if unplayable on pc). Easily able to rate games, manage my reviews for them, categorize and curate game lists. Howlongtobeat support would be cool (or it's own game time tracker). I love seeing how long it takes to beat games, and don't mind contributing my times (and logging it for myself). Tracking play history (what days/hours, how long, which games).
Steam has a lot of good features. Having a customizable profile page. I wanna be able to quickly share with people my gaming tastes/preferences, have a little customizable profile thing. Find others into similar kinds of games. Groups are cool, but idk why I never feel like it's worth it to contribute to steam groups (either feeling unwelcoming, or they're dead lol).
Stream/viewshare options. Along with making it easy to jump into multiplayer with someone (either joining existing play session, or starting one together).
Tagging/categorizing/recommending games is very important, especially for a storefront. Steam's system is dogshit for finding games I wanna play; mostly because the user tags end up mistagging a game entirely. hentai games show up for the "otome" tag, games like hello kitty get tagged as "horror", etc. making them basically undiscoverable.
Stuff I don't care about would be things like those steam items/unlockables, achievements, trophies, etc. So many game platforms do this and I just don't care. I wanna play the game, with friends if multiplayer, and I wanna find new games and share what I'm into. don't nag me about some item shit I don't care about lol.
One thing that'd be cool is having an out-of-game item marketplace for player economy. For instance we see sites like https://nookazon.com/ pop up as a dedicated website. why not have that as a built in feature to the client?
I don't care for "curators" other than on a user level. I run a steam curator page myself, but I think this sort of thing should be per person/account. Let me recommend a game or put a little thought about it that I can share with friends or others with similar interests.
I don't care for steam's "game community" thing. They try really hard to have a sort of mini-social-network for each game where you can post comments or screenshots or whatever. In the end, no one uses it seriously and it's just spam.
Basically: I just wanna be able to manage the games I own, track the games I have outside the platform, track my playtime, show my game preferences, easily connect with friends, and watch others or jump into game together. Steam does this pretty well in most aspects. They have a lot of fluff but that's ignorable.
epic games, in comparison, is just bad. the ui is laggy and slow, it's ugly, there's no way to curate what I like or categorize things, there's no way to share my tastes/preferences with others, there's no way to discover interesting new games. no way to manage mods.
ultimately though: there needs to be games, or a way to track or launch games that aren't sold on the platform. steam lets you add non-steam games to launch, but it's awful, annoying, and sucks.
also fix tags/recommendation/discoverability. I like niche stuff that people unfortunately feel the need to troll on, so discoverability ends up being difficult.
agree on many of these points. the biggest thing I would want from a system like this is license portability. the binaries can be shuttled around relatively easily and scaling static file delivery is point and click practically these days.
a way to track license ownership so i could play on whatever service (likely with a nominal fee to cover storage, compute, etc) at the quality level i paid for would be amazing. could also open up more direct customer opportunities for developers since in a system like this id expect the devs to control thier own sales, cuts, etc. With cloud gaming going the way it is, this would be a huge enabler to the market if the entrenched players could let it grow.
Isn't it called BitTorrent?
This is for organizing games not for file-sharing.
steam is a storefront, not a game manager.
Woosh
Im a bit confused. What's self hosted here? I download a game onto my computer from Steam, now Im self hosting it for myself. Is it someone else that's hosting the games for download and selling them? Might be cool to pay and download games directly from a developer, if that's at all possible from this, but thats not mentioned anywhere.
Is it just file sharing? Is that what this is?
To cut out the BS legal double speak, it's so you can have a steam-like interface that's designed to be natively compatible with pirated games and allow friends to access them from your server
It seems to be an application where you can access all your games at once, in the vein of steams library section. Not really interested.
but thats just basically a folder of shortcuts, my games arent in steam's library, they're installed on my PC. Steam is a storefront.
They described it as jellyfin but for games. Yet unlike with jellyfin where you can stream your media to any device, you just can't do that with games. So yeah it's basically a server to put your games on for convenient downloading to your PC, which seems utterly pointless and expensive.
Maybe there will be future features that make it useful, but I can't currently think of a use case for this other than maybe you're already running a torrent server and this just provides some convenience and a few QOL improvements. I can't see regular people using this though.
you absolutely can stream games. It's doable, it's just hard. nvidia's geforce now does game streaming over the internet. On a LAN it could really work well IMO. Steam link also did this on lan.
not super desirable for most users, but there's an appeal there and it is indeed doable.
I wasn't talking about the exceptions to the rule, I simply meant that from a practical standpoint you aren't going to be able to stream 99% of your games over the internet and this service doesn't offer that, unlike jellyfin's media. But yes you're right streaming games is a thing, just not in this case.
ah, then yeah you're right. it's possible in theory, but in practice not really. and it's not even desirable for most.
If you want to stream games there is a GitHub user called Games-on-whales. He has two docker programs that are effectively a game streaming server capable of serving multiple users.
It's not fully developed yet and I encountered a few issues while testing it, but it was very quick and easy to setup.
.
I've not heard of this controversially named platform. What should I google?
Holy fuck, just... Why?
Edgelords be edgy.
That thread was a fun read lol
Out of everything they could have chosen, I could not have expected that. It's a poor choice but I still laughed heartily.
Well then...
I don't... get the appeal? Other than managing pirated games, what's the use of this?
There seems to be a lot of limp-wrist ninnies there clutching their pearls because a pirated game software manager suite is called "Crackpipe".
Holy shit, three replies in and someone is already grandstanding as some anti-racist hero by bringing up the crack epidemic.
Lutris is great, does that count?
If you consider that lutris is not decentralised, probably not
What a hell is this "self hosted alternative"? I you talking about pirating games??
Emulator compatibility would be great too. It’d be great to bring Steam like features to a platform that works with N64/PS2/Xbox games.
open source, preferably AGPL.
Open Source, the sweet market I really want to sell my games too
Sell?
Yes, how do you think games are made? But I have the feeling you are just about to run into the first problem this idea has.
I'd love to be able to cloud stream the games. But would need to lock others from cloud streaming if it's in use, or even better, stream to both at once for split screen gaming.
Would be nice to have overlays and chat features similar to steam. Maybe hooking into matrix and activity pub for sharing what game and chatting with friends
I would really like if the metadata included some recipes to install the games in different systems because I find using DRM-free games on Linux much harder than on Windows. Perhaps it's the lack of practice.
The only thing I would remotely be interested in for the purposes of what Steam does, but on a decentralized platform, is having multiple backups in case of server outages.
Ideally, I don't want a service like Steam at all. I just like having an off-site backup to my games. I also don't really want to have "crack pipe download" be in my search history.
You can't build a decentralized gaming platform similar to steam hahaha