This is my final reply in this thread. The developer has said their piece, and I have said mine. Now you’ve waded in - so let me set the record straight.

I am a developer. I had genuine interest in this project. I read the Hister documentation and inspected parts of the repository because the documentation did not clearly answer several basic questions I had:

• How SQLite, Bleve, and stored HTML relate.

• Whether TTL or storage quotas exist.

• How browser-history deletion affects stored data.

• How previews differ from a real web archive.

• What multi-user isolation actually covers.

Yes, I used AI to assemble a plain-language summary and labelled it accordingly. Not everyone keeps the Hister codebase in their head, not everyone talks in code review and if I had these questions, I’m willing to bet others did too. The AI wrote for a lay audience because I didn’t ask it to do QA, I asked it to ELI-5.

The summary contained errors. Fine. That’s AI for you. However, if neither I nor the AI could find clear answers after cloning the repo, that supports my point about opacity.

At no point did I request a line-by-line audit. “Points 2 and 5 are wrong” would have answered the question.

Declining would also have been reasonable. Hell, side stepping it would have been fine too. Instead the dev decided to note the inaccuracies and rudely brush them off.

Both you and the dev seem to be under the impression !selfhosted is a one way distribution channel.

The developer came here, invited questions, then turned the raw prawn when questions arrived.

I didn’t go to their their Github. I didn’t abuse them. I genuinely wanted to know more about their project and share it, perhaps even work to help improve it.

They - and now you, ostensibly a happy clapper for Hister - came here.

Your claims about my effort and intent are assumptions followed by personal abuse.

Try and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before calling them low effort and shitty next time.

That is not what happened.

I fed your GitHub repository to a clanker because the documentation did not answer my questions. I then shared its summary here.

You replied afterwards and said the summary was wrong. Fair enough. I then asked which specific points were wrong.

You could have answered, declined, or ignored the post.

Instead, you deigned only to dismiss the effort, then blamed me for objecting.

You also asked which parts were confusing, although my previous reply had already listed those issues.

You did not address them then, either.

A prospective user should not need ChatGPT, a cloned repository, and several follow-up questions to understand key functions.

You invited feedback. Your documentation remains unclear on several points, including issues beyond those I listed.

Your responses show that further feedback is not worth my time.

I am happy to narrow it further.

I took the time to read the documentation, ask ChatGPT to summarise what I found, and then reduced my follow-up to a simple request:

«Which of points 1–7 are materially wrong?»

That is not the same as asking you to audit “multiple screens” of AI output.

If the answer is “2 and 5 are incorrect”, or even “I do not have time to review it”, that is perfectly fine.

However, dismissing it as “a multiple screens long AI prompt” does not only not answer the question, it comes off as abrasive.

As for the documentation, the confusing parts are exactly those I listed: retention, lifecycle management, browser ingestion, storage limits, deletion, multi-user behaviour, and, most importantly, what Hister actually is and who it is for.

What’s disappointing is not that you disagreed with the AI summary. AIs are idiots.

It that after inviting questions and feedback, your response to a genuine attempt to understand the project is curt dismissal.

The inner workings of Hister may be obvious to you; they are not obvious to others.

The point is that you came here specifically to invite questions and feedback.

“TL;DR” does not encourage the sort of community engagement you ostensibly came here to seek.

Excellent - thanks for clearing that up.

Is there a TTL / max database size per user setting? Say I have 4 users using the server; can I allocate a hard limit of 10GB per user, with 180 day retention rules?

Additionally, is the other parenthetical information materially correct? If not, which points [1 thru to 7] are wrong?

I would like to further recommend Hister but your documentation is somewhat confusing at first blush.

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Its a simplied front end for people to request shows / movies. Normies find Radarr / Sonarr somewhat perplexing.

https://github.com/Ombi-app/Ombi

You never cease to amaze me, irmadlad.

I think I’m going to put a declarations.md that says something like “I made this for me, but I’m sharing it with the world. If you find it useful, use it and let me know! If you find issues, submit request and I’ll look but no promises. And if you want feature X … fork it and build it. The code’s yours, with my blessings. PS: I don’t accept PRs, sorry”.

I code for fun; I’m not looking for a third unpaid job. That’s what parenting is for.

Please tell me that’s ai slop parody.

I mean…it has to be. And the fact YouTube is just merrily injecting it into their streams is amazing.

I use Smartube and PipePipe and haven’t seen ads on YT since forever. Is this really what it’s like now?

Interesting question. If you are asking for an LLM (that is self-hosted and can do that?), you’re going to need to provide some significant tooling, like rag / documentation, troubleshooting, sort out concurrency, front end etc. Honestly…it just easier to point them at a YouTube (network chuck has good stuff).

It absolutely can be done and it absolutely can be valuable - for you personally. But if they’re having trouble doing basic things like installing jelly fin, they have zero chance of doing something like that themselves.

Honestly, I think your easiest option for your non-technical friends is just to point them at one of the cloud providers, like chatGPT or Claude.

OTOH, how much work are you willing to put into this and what’s your GPU / LLM set up like? There

Your basic foot in door starting point is going to be installing and provisioning OpenWebui, getting a good local model up and running (Qwen3.6-35B or Qwen3.6-27B) and creating a “Knowledge Base” in OWUI with requisite documentation. You’ll need to set up tailscale / headscale so they can access your OWUI instance from their homes, too.

If you’re serious about this, write back and I’ll thumbnail sketch it out for you. It’s a good project and I’ve done similar. There are real complexities to something like this beyond just “install ollama, lol done”.

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Dunno if you can do this with ipads, but I’ve been (idly) considering using old phones to create an Alfred camera system

https://alfred.camera/

Probably not…but it’s a fun idea.

That’s nice and clean…and I love that you have both random fact and XKCD. Too many front ends look like a space shuttle launch control; this one has soul

Yo ho, all together, hoist the colors high

Heave ho, thieves and beggars

Never shall we die

You love to see it.

Self identifying as the baddy makes my life easier.

Samsung, Apple, LG - who’s next? Speak up, please.

Hope it helps!

Sounds good. And Meilisearch handles that OK?

I am simpatico with her position.

For what it’s worth, self-hosting doesn’t mean you need to be able to reach all your services off-site.

LAN only access is perfectly valid and something that I prefer myself.

Case in point -

Last year I went to Japan for 5 weeks and rather than opening up dodgy ports to my home media services, I ended up taking a 128GB USB stick, my Chromecast and installing Nova Player.

https://github.com/nova-video-player/aos-AVP

Nova Player populates on device from your attached storage to create essentially a jellyfin like front-end. Install it, plug the chrome cast or whatever into HDMI on any TV and you’re off to the races.

It’s wonderful and it’s actually now my primary streaming media source in the house; I just plug in my hard drive to my router, Nova sees it and my media sources are cross-populated to all of my Android devices.

Are you optimizing for a polished experience or for simplicity?

If for something polished that works very well, you’ve probably already found the best solution - immich. There’s also Piwigo, Photoprism etc.

If you’re looking for something simpler, can I suggest using syncthing (think: like a local version of Dropbox, sorta), with PiGallery2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthing

https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2

The idea here is that it creates a website that you can access on your Wi-Fi that is populated by the files that you push into the folder using your sync thing.

That’s not as elegant as immich, but it’s another option if you’re looking for low-end hardware.