The Beautiful Absurdity of Self-Hosting: Why We Over-Engineer Everything
Someone on Reddit recently announced Wizarr 2025.10.0, and buried in their feature list was this absolutely perfect line: “Overengineering solutions is in the essence of selfhosting and homelabbing!” The comments that followed were gold - people practically queuing up to admit they felt personally attacked by this statement. One user mentioned implementing single sign-on through Authentik for just two users. Another wrote their own log processor because they were fed up with their existing setup not working perfectly.
For those who haven’t fallen down this particular rabbit hole, Wizarr is essentially a fancy invitation system for media servers like Plex and Jellyfin. Think of it as a sophisticated doorman for your digital media collection - it creates pretty invitation links, guides new users through setup, and manages permissions across multiple servers. The developer freely admits it’s probably overkill for most people’s three-user setups, but that’s exactly what makes it brilliant.
This whole discussion got me thinking about my own home setup. Last month, I spent an entire weekend configuring monitoring for my Raspberry Pi cluster using Prometheus and Grafana. Why? Because I wanted pretty graphs showing the CPU usage of the single Docker container running my family’s photo backup. My daughter looked at the dashboard and asked, “Dad, why do you need all this for backing up our holiday photos?” I didn’t have a good answer beyond “because I can.”
The thing is, there’s something deeply satisfying about building these elaborate systems. It’s like creating a Swiss watch when you really just need to know what time it is. Sure, I could have manually invited the handful of people who access my Jellyfin server, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I’m genuinely considering setting up Wizarr just so I can have a proper onboarding flow for my mum when she finally agrees to ditch Netflix.
This over-engineering tendency extends far beyond media servers. Visit any self-hosting forum and you’ll find people running entire Kubernetes clusters for their grocery lists, or implementing complex authentication systems for services only they use. One commenter mentioned having a Docker compose file called “MIDAS” with twenty services in it, most of them variants of automated downloaders (the “*arr” applications). It’s completely mad and utterly wonderful.
What strikes me about this community is the honesty about the absurdity. Nobody’s pretending this is the most efficient way to solve these problems. We know we’re using enterprise-grade hammers to crack very small nuts. But there’s value in the process beyond the end result. Every over-engineered solution teaches us something new, whether it’s about containerization, networking, monitoring, or just the satisfaction of making disparate systems work together harmoniously.
The environmental part of my brain occasionally pipes up with concerns about all this computational overhead. Running multiple services to manage three users probably isn’t the most carbon-efficient approach. But then I remember that learning these technologies at home makes me better at implementing genuinely efficient solutions at work, where they actually matter at scale.
There’s also something beautifully democratic about this whole ecosystem. Wizarr exists because someone thought, “You know what, inviting people to my media server should be prettier and more professional.” They didn’t wait for Plex or Jellyfin to build this feature - they just built it themselves and shared it with everyone. The fact that we’re all enabling each other’s over-engineering tendencies through open-source projects is one of the best things about the modern web.
Maybe the real value isn’t in the efficiency of our solutions, but in the community we build around making things unnecessarily good. Every elaborately documented Docker compose file, every beautifully themed dashboard, every automated invitation system for three users - they’re all little acts of digital craftsmanship. We’re not just solving problems; we’re solving them with style, learning along the way, and sharing the results with anyone else who might appreciate the artistry of a well-architected home lab.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go research whether Wizarr integrates with my single sign-on setup. For purely academic purposes, of course.