Thoughts on Vikunja and the tension between self-hosting, ownership, and corporate branding

I’d sum it up with:

“Ew.”

Its one thing to offer bespoke customization for businesses. Its entirely another to work to prevent any indication that the software is being run by someone other than the creator of the software. IMO, it goes against self hosting as a practice.

It could be everything I want and more, and it would immediately turn me away. Which, in turn, would also turn me away from recommending it to others, including businesses.

I’d call it a pretty bad strategy.

The write up is detailed, but the fact is that Vikunja does not support customization of their self-hosted platform. If you tried it, you’ll have definitely noticed. It is worthy of discussion, especially for those of us enthusiasts explicitly wanting to “own” our platform identities through self-hosting. Isn’t that exactly why we use Lemmy and self-hosting?

I might be missing something but the paid tiers don’t include something like theming either, nor did the developer include theming/branding as part of the list of features he wanted to put behind some enterprise plan in the original post you’re commenting on. I’m mentioning this because of the “In Relation to Monetization & Enterprise Plans” section. There seems to be no such instinct you’re mentioning there.

From the issues I found on Github I did find some related to what you asked for:

• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/502
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/3590
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/479

The issues seem to be something with Bulma, finding a way to do it cleanly, and it not being a high priority right now. But from the conversations in those issues it does seem like a pull request would be welcome.

After reading the “Developer perspective” section, I also wanted to note that for a lot of projects like this, the developer does the brunt of the work. I know commits aren’t always the best metric, but the developer has 819 and the next one on the list (excluding the bots and Claude’s 5 commits) has 4 commits to their name. That difference more than makes up for the inaccuracies of counting commits. So sure, some people may have considered contributing, but most don’t. Let alone fork the project.

Basically, the reasons the features you want aren’t there are because:

1. The developer didn’t have time for it/didn’t want to spend the time on it (which is fair enough; he is doing free labour from our perspective as self hosters), and
2. nobody else bothered to do it yet. (With an exception to issue 479, because someone injected css from the client a couple of months ago)

My thoughts on open source software missing features is, and always has been: it’s free and the source is there. If you don’t like it fix it.

If you want customization, just rebuild the binaries with the images you want. You don’t even need to write code.