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What I Self Host

(fredrikmeyer.net)
116 points FredrikMeyer | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 16:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | source
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zahlman ◴[20 Oct 25 16:35 UTC] No.45645835[source]▶
There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?
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1. 0x01FE ◴[20 Oct 25 17:19 UTC] No.45646485[source]▶
Specifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it.

So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred.

I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.