Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

My mom digitized many many old family videos, and wanted them online for sharing with family (including elderly & not-super-tech-savvy relatives). She asked me “should I just upload them all to a YouTube channel?”

Thankfully it was a phone call so my mom didn’t see my aghast expression. I prefer that big tech not index this stuff! Better to keep “in the family”

Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-private window into me & my ancestors lives?

So I wrote something[1] where:

* it’s fully free & open source

* cloud native

* plays on any device, any bandwidth, even if shitty

* yes my 90+yo Aunt Loretta (w00t to you Aunt Lo!) can use it on her phone & computer

* all data can be always encrypted, both source videos and derived/optimized assets

* and there’s more. please have fun

Basically point it at a source bucket on S3 or B2, and get your own private YouTube.

What I’ve built is very limited in functionality atm, but I believe the foundation is solid and plan to extend media support to photos and audio.

This can be a nice alternative to Plex/Google Photos/YT/etc.

It’s for when you don’t care about “building an audience” and in fact prefer that big tech can only see encrypted bytes from you.

Try it out and lmk!

[1] https://github.com/cobbzilla/yuebing

Not saying you shouldn't do this, but by publishing under AGPL plus

If you are an individual person or a not-for-profit organization, and your usage of this software is entirely non-commercial, you may use this software under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, summarized below and reprinted in full thereafter.

you have effectively created a new license and it's not completely clear to me what that new license even means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away from it.

With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

Use the AGPL. I promise not to sue any individual person or non-profit org.

And you’re right, for-profit companies should either stay away for safety or contact me for terms.

The danger here is that your additional terms might be ineffective. The problem is, if you distribute it to an individual or a non-profit organization under the terms of the AGPL, then that individual or non-profit organization has the right to redistribute the software to anyone, including for-profit organizations, under the terms of the AGPL. It says so in the very first sentence after the copyright notice!

So if you do not want to allow this, then you must use something other than the AGPL. (Or maybe you could do some funky patching of the AGPL's terms, but you'd have to be careful to only do so by reference, since its text is copyrighted by the FSF, who only permit distribution of verbatim copies.)

Also, you should probably avoid calling it "fully free & open source" as you did in your original comment, since you intend for it to be neither Free nor Open Source in the sense ordinarily meant by FOSS.

Plenty of FOSS is dual licensed, this really isn’t as hard or complicated as some are making it out to be.