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c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · mrmaplebar@fedia.io · 7 Sep 2026

Any self-hostable alternative to playit.gg for easily exposing local game servers to the public internet?

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For those who don't know, playit.gg is a free/cheap service for exposing self-hosted local game servers to the wider internet.

But as someone who already has access to a cheapish VPS, I'm curious if anyone knows of any self-hostable alternatives that I could just run as a container on my VPS.

I've been toying with using Wireguard UDP tunneling, but it's proving to be a little bit more difficult and complicated than I was bargaining for. So if anyone knows of anything out there that does something like this, I'd be grateful!

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c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · mrmaplebar@fedia.io · 31 Aug 2026

What are my best options for hosting classic game servers in 2026?

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I've been increasingly getting into the idea of hosting some servers for classic PC games like Counter Strike 1.6 and various Half-Life mods, but I'm curious what the consensus is for what the best options are for doing so right now.

I have some experience hosting servers at home in a "homelab" kind of context (mostly for stuff like Jellyfin, Samba, etc.), and I know how to spin up docker containers and administer a Linux computer decently for LAN use. Right now I use tailscale to access my homelab stuff remotely, but I don't know if that would work well in the context of hosting a public game server.

Generally I don't have much knowledge about safely exposing my local hardware to the wider internet for my circle of ~20 friends to join.

So basically I'm wondering what you all would do for hosting game servers if you were going to start today...

Would you use local hardware with port forwarding? Or would you go with a VPS (and if so, can you recommend one for North America)?

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• The most respectable.

  on asking the existential questions here in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1d ago

• He's running out of things to rename.

  on Trump says the US is officially renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• Why are we acting like it's news that generative AI companies are building their core products of the theft and exploitation of other people's intellectual labor?

  Get with the program, it's their entire business model.

  on AI Didn't Steal the Mathematician's Work, Sam Altman Did in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026

• This seems like a totally needless blunder from Sony and an easy win for Microsoft.

  If the game succeeds, Xbox now has the opportunity to have funded a spiritual sequel to Metal Gear Solid. But even if it doesn't go anywhere, they have broken Kojima away from Playstation, at the very least.

  The amount of intellectual property that Sony has let depart or atrophy over the decades is wild.

  on Hideo Kojima's PHYSINT Game Moves to Xbox From PlayStation in c/games@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026

• I was hoping to have servers be more public, so visible on the master server list and able to be joined by random people. (I'm a glutton for punishment I guess. lol)

  on Any self-hostable alternative to playit.gg for easily exposing local game servers to the public internet? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.

  To me "slop" is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there's a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.

  For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place...), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.

  There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.

  Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.

  But is that what your local AI is trained on?

  If so, cool and good for you, you're using the tool ethically.

  But that's not what I'm seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga's background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it's just blatant exploitation of one man's life's work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can't tell the difference between AI slop and human art.

  I could go on but you don't really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn't be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.

  This comparison isn't exactly working in your favor...

  Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?

  Odds are that the model you're using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn't see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people's profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.

  This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the "means of production", creative types today aren't even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.

  It is a tool. It exists. You can't stuff the genie back in the box.

  Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact.
  Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn't wait 50-100 years to consider them.

  The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the "tool" that you're unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.

  on Do not use ai in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 25 Aug 2026

• Ok, you have a local model... but did you train it yourself? On what data?

  Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that's built on top of the exploitation of other people's work.

  Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.

  There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.

  Personally I don't care how "useful" people want to claim AI is. For one, I'm not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they're all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don't justify the means, so if we're exploitint people to generate slop I don't really care how nice the slop is.

  on Do not use ai in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 25 Aug 2026

• Even most of of the local and "open" models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.

  There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.

  on Do not use ai in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 25 Aug 2026

• Personally I have major ethical objections to the way that the vast majority of generative AI is done today, so I'm pretty much against it regardless of the hypothetical perceived quality of the end result.

  The ends really don't justify the means, and I want to support the human beings working hard to make authentic media in the future.

  I don't want to play someone's lazy and exploitative AI slop game any more than I want to look at someone's slop art or listen to slop music.

  on A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics in c/gaming@beehaw.org · 24 Aug 2026

• Oh NOW you care about stealing intellectual property!

  Fuck off. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, AI assholes.

  on Chinese memory firm CXMT relied on leaked Samsung technology to skip years of R&D, court testimony claims in c/technology@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026

• I like a distro with problems that I can relate to.

  on Happy Manjaro Certificate expiration day! To all who celebrate! in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026

• Yes...

  The document notes how Nvidia reached out to Anna’s Archive, stating that it’s “exploring including Anna’s Archive in pre-training data for [Nvidia’s] LLMs.

  “Internal documents show competitive pressures drove Nvidia to piracy,” states the complaint, also revealing that before proceeding with the access, Anna’s Archive informed the company that its content was “illegally acquired and maintained.”

  Despite this, Nvidia proceeded with the piracy, which resulted in the company receiving “millions of pirated copyrighted books,” or “roughly 500 terabytes of data.”

  https://cybernews.com/ai-news/nvidia-annas-archive-ai-training/

  on AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• These AA frauds are directly providing AI companies with scraped data, no?

  on AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• What I think the average person who may not have an eye for art or an attention to details might not understand is, a lot of AI art that comes across as convincing to the untrained eye is still, at the very least, living deep in the uncanny valley.

  Much in the same way that an AI voice or video can look somewhat convincing but a little bit off, the same thing is true for AI artwork. People who are artists or who have at least learned to see the nuance in art can often see the weirdness in generative AI "art", even if it is sometimes hard to explain exactly why it feels off (maybe it's the subtlety of the lighting, the shape design, the line quality, etc.).

  Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to fool an untrained eye? Easily.

  Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to feel a trained eye? Sure, but it's going to be a lot harder.

  In the case of these guys, they really aren't fooling almost anyone with their obvious slop. Frankly, it doesn't take a well-tuned eye for artistry to see that their artwork looks like every generic AI slop art output that we've been barraged with over the last year and change.

  on Following accusations, James Pond Legacy devs say no generative AI was used in creating artwork in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Sure... I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.

  Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can't always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate... If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of "proof of work".

  Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.

  When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. "You can fool some people sometime, but you can't fool all the people all the time." These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it's raining...

  on Following accusations, James Pond Legacy devs say no generative AI was used in creating artwork in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Pretty wild to see considering how many years the game was in development and some of the names behind it.

  on 2XKO Active Development Will End in December 2026 in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• 100% AI slop. These people must think we were born yesterday.

  on Following accusations, James Pond Legacy devs say no generative AI was used in creating artwork in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• How can they "open source" other people's work?

  The data that they've trained on wasn't theirs to begin with.

  on If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US should nationalize them in c/technology@lemmy.world · 19 Aug 2026

• Absolutely fucking not.

  Nationalizing AI companies represents nothing more than a big tech bailout, leaving the American taxpayers holding the bag for the grandiose excesses, industrialized IP theft, and borderline fraudulence of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in modern society.

  Hell no. No bailout for big AI.

  They stole everything they have from the people, and if they are too stupid to figure out how to turn unprecedented plagiarism on a global scale into a viable business plan, then they deserve nothing more than to fail outright.

  on If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US should nationalize them in c/technology@lemmy.world · 19 Aug 2026

• How's the crack work on Linux?

  on Cracked version of Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls on PC runs better than official release - Variable in c/games@lemmy.world · 19 Aug 2026

• They're planning on it. They want nothing more than to go public and leave retail investors and retirement plans holding the bag.

  on Nvidia scales back funding guarantee for Ohio OpenAI data center, WSJ reports in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026

• The evolutionary power inherent to all "spiral beings" including humans and animals, and absent in beastmen and anti-spirals.

  The spiral metaphor is present in everything from animal DNA, to Simon's drill, and all the way up to the scale of galaxies themselves. To me it represents the power of evolution, reproduction, dynamism, and the perpetual desire to be and do more.

  As I understand it, the anti-spirals view spiral power as an out of control threat to the stability and order of the universe, and so it is up to Lordgenome the Spiral King and his army of basement to prevent spiral power from growing too much by limiting the population of the planet and having all other humans live underground.

  on Gurren Lagann fans: What exactly is "spiral power"? in c/anime@ani.social · 17 Aug 2026

• Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her.

  Man, these people have lost their fucking marbles...

  on Saber CEO scorns writer who says she was fired in favor of AI with confusing, combative statement in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Call me cynical, but I think this is an attempt to do the bare minimum in an effort to preempt laws being put in place.

  on ‘New models will mark AI-generated content from day one’: Claude will now hide an invisible watermark inside ordinary words in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026