How this started
My phone was always full, and our NAS was fifteen years old and out of updates.
So on some Saturdays I copied photos off the phone to an external drive, like a
caveman.
I build software for a living, and I enjoy it. So I built our own stack on a
Mac in the living room. famstack grew out of that pain and my joy in
building things. The longer story is on the why page.
What's in the kit
This is what famstack
runs on the Mac in our living room. Each piece is open source.
Replaces Google Photos
Automatic backup from every phone, face recognition, shared albums, map view. The mobile app your family will actually use.
Replaces the filing cabinet
Photograph a letter, drop it in the chat, and the local AI files it. Months later, ask about it and get the answer with the document it came from.
Keeps what the kids say
The family diary
Voice messages and photos from the memories room become a diary you read back month by month. Plain files on your Mac.
The household's chat
Private family chat, notes, files and a room per topic, with apps for every phone. Also where the bots talk to you.
For the personal stuff
Local AI on the Mac's GPU
Language models, voice transcription and speech on Apple Metal (oMLX, Whisper, Piper). Open WebUI if you want a chat window.
Keeps a copy
Nightly backups
Append-only backups of photo originals, scanned documents and the family chat to a disk you plug into the Mac.
I still use Gmail. I still have a Google account. I moved what matters most
to my family, and kept the rest.
I draw the line at family photos. Every photo of our kids growing up,
stored on Google's servers, analyzed by systems I didn't ask for. Google
knowing what time I check my calendar is fine. The photos are different.
Arthur, Lake Constance
What I keep
- Gmail. Self-hosted email is painful and unreliable.
- WhatsApp for the wider family and the school parents.
- Cloud AI for the hard problems. By default, the personal questions stay home.
Each of these services is useful on its own. famstack's part is the wiring:
one installer, one CLI (./stack up photos), a local AI that
reads the documents and listens to the voice messages, and nightly backups
of the photos, documents and family chat.
What we are running at home
What each service does well, and what you give up compared to Google.
Photos: Immich replaces Google Photos
Ready Immich is the reason this guide exists. It looks
and feels like Google Photos: automatic backup from your phone, face recognition,
map view, shared albums. We love it. It just feels good to have all our
photos available at any time, on every phone in the family.
What you'll miss
Some of Google's polish. Immich has "on this day" memories and a smart search
that understands plain words like "beach" and combines them with a person's
face. Not quite as good as Google's yet, but Immich is catching up with every
release.
Verdict
For backing up, browsing and sharing family photos, Immich is ready. Whether
the trade-off is worth it depends on how you feel about your family photos on
someone else's servers.
Set up Immich on your Mac → Documents: Paperless-ngx replaces the filing cabinet
Ready Paperless-ngx replaces the drawer full
of paper, and Google Drive's role as a document dumping ground. In famstack the
local AI does the filing. Ask the archivist in the chat "when does our car
insurance expire?" and you get an actual answer, with the documents it came from.
What you'll miss
Collaborative documents. For shared spreadsheets or real-time editing,
Nextcloud fills that gap. famstack doesn't
install it; you can run it yourself on the same Mac.
Verdict
I spent years being embarrassingly bad at organizing paperwork. This solved it.
Chat: Matrix + Element for the household
Ready for the household
For us, this is the best part of the kit. Since we set up a
Tailscale VPN to reach
the Mac from anywhere, our private conversations and family planning have moved
off WhatsApp to our own Matrix server
completely. Element has become our family
intranet: chat, notes, bookmarks, files we send between our own devices, and a
room per topic, from interior design to school.
It's also where the kit talks to you. Drop a letter in the documents room and
the archivist replies with where it filed it. Voice messages in the memories
room come back as cards for the family diary.
What you'll miss
WhatsApp's polish. Element has rough edges: notifications can be unreliable
and sync sometimes lags. And your parents and the school parent group will
stay on WhatsApp.
Verdict
Move the household over. Keep WhatsApp for everyone else.
Reach the Mac from anywhere with Tailscale → Local AI: the layer that ties it together
Ready for the daily stuff
famstack runs open-source language models on your Mac's GPU with
oMLX, plus Whisper for voice
transcription and Piper for speech. It files what lands in Paperless, transcribes
the voice messages, writes the family wiki and the diary, and answers questions
about your documents. Open WebUI adds a
ChatGPT-style window for the family.
What you'll miss
The best local models are good, but they're not the big cloud models. For a long
contract read clause by clause, or tricky debugging, you'll still reach for the cloud.
Local models don't browse the internet either.
Verdict
A private family assistant for the daily stuff, and the part that files,
transcribes and writes the diary for the other services. By default, the
personal questions stay on your Mac.
How local LLMs work on a Mac → Ad blocking: AdGuard Home replaces browser extensions
Optional, beta AdGuard Home blocks
ads and trackers at the DNS level, for every device on your network: phones,
tablets, smart TVs. famstack's infra stacklet (beta) runs it when you give the
stack its own domain. Without one, you can install it yourself next to famstack.
What you'll miss
A few apps break when they depend on ad infrastructure, so you'll whitelist a
domain or two in the first week. And once the router points at the Mac, the
house has no DNS while the Mac is down.
Verdict
Set it up once on the router, and most ads and trackers are blocked on every
device, without an app on each one.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to degoogle?
Doing it from scratch? Weeks. Picking the services, configuring Docker, wiring
everything together, troubleshooting networking, getting AI to talk to
Paperless. With famstack, the technical setup takes a weekend. The actual
transition (migrating photos, getting family on new apps, building the habit)
still takes a few weeks. Start with photos. Add the rest when you're ready.
Is degoogling worth the effort?
Depends on what bothers you. Family photos on someone else's servers bother me.
Subscription creep bothers me. Even without those, it's a satisfying project
and you learn a lot about how infrastructure works. If none of that resonates,
Google's products are good. No judgment.
Do I need to be technical?
You need to be comfortable with a terminal. If you can clone a git repo and
edit a config file, you can run famstack. The Docker configuration, service
wiring and AI integration are done for you.
Can Immich replace Google Photos?
For backup, browsing and sharing, yes. The mobile app is excellent and the web
interface is polished. Immich has "on this day" memories and a smart search
now, not quite as good as Google's yet.
What hardware do I need?
Any Apple Silicon Mac with at least 16 GB of memory. On 16 GB the local AI runs
a small model: document answers work well in English, German and other languages
are noticeably weaker. 32 GB or more gives the best quality, German included. A used Mac Mini M1 works. We run ours on a Mac Studio M1 Max with
64 GB, but that's overkill for most households.
What's the hardest Google service to replace?
Gmail. Self-hosted email is painful and unreliable. Keep it. The services
worth replacing are the ones storing your family's private data: photos,
documents, messages, and the AI you talk to about personal things.
Why famstack instead of doing it myself?
You can do it yourself. Every service in the kit is open source and free.
famstack's value is the configuration: services that are wired together, a
local AI that files your documents and answers questions about them, a family
diary, backups that work, and a setup that's been tested with a real family.