A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.
I've always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.
So having my own Netflix is a great thing.
Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool
Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.
I have things that aren't even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.
No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.
I really hope you have that backed up
He/she probably has all his/her movies backed up in the internet ;)
Home Assistant. It's a rabbit hole, but it's great. I've got motion enabled lights, thermostats for "dumb" heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
And it's so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
As others have worded it, it's a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it's a fun hobby, and I've learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.
Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.
I'll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich
Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix
Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you'll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.
Does duplicati have to do periodic full backups?
I've used borgbackup / borgmatic. One full backup and only incrementals thereafter.
For me it's 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I'm dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:
My experience has been that Nextcloud can do 1000 different things, and it sucks at all of them.
Been using nextcloud for about 5 years, right now I use it for storing files and nothing else, and it still kinda sucks at that.
Gonna use paperless for any documents I have in NC, after that there won’t be much left in there, just some old dot files. Maybe I’ll get rid of it entirely
I tried setting up nextcloud. Just ended up creating a samba share instead.
Carnet to replace google keep notes
Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing
I did this and it led to hosting a baby within my wife. Was pretty steep learning curve and now have zero downtime.
So, if I understand correctly it at least had life changing consequences.
FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one
Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren't in the cloud.
This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don't trust the cloud providers.
I second your opinion about not selfhosting Bitwarden. About email, have a look at Proton mail. All the emails are encrypted in the server and are decripted client side with your password only when you open them.
Running a Tor exit node could certainly be life changing. Not sure in a good way, guess it depends which country you live in.
I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It's a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn't give you a call weekly.
It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn't make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they're forced to kill my connection if situation doesn't improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that's not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.
If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don't have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.
And of course there's legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you're living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.
Nextcloud to replace Google drive/docs. Jellyfin or plex for media. The arrs to aquire media (if you have the patience). A blog? A game server to play with friends.
I suggest using docker and docker-compose as it makes everything way easier. It does still take time and it can be frustrating but it is very rewarding.
Crosspost from the duplicate
Swinger parties?
TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it's available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!
Docker I can't wrap my head around. I keep trying to spend a night and sit down and play around with it. But I hit a block, get distracted and never get anywhere.
Your own nextcloud instance. Then move everything that is saved at Google over to your own server.
Calenders, Filesync, Contacts sync with android works really nice.
Knowing my data is stored only on my own devices and google doesn't know more about me than I do is a nice feeling.
Oh this sounds amazing. Do you have a link with more info so we can check it out?
a tor exit node :P /s
After what happened to imgur and gfycat, definitely their own image hosting service.
@jaackf
SyncThing. It's the best sort of selfhosted program. You set it up once and then never think about it because it just keeps quietly doing what you wanted.
Wikis can be great if you've got a few folks that need to coordinate information.
An RSS reader/aggregator.
Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:
Thanks for teaching me about LiveSync, not being able to sync my notes with mobile without an obsidian account has been annoying, but none of the web based interfaces look at nice or as usable as obsidian. Being able to sync everything between desktops and mobile will be really handy.
PiHole!
One of the easiest installer I've ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.
This was my gateway into the selfhosting world. I don't think I would've kept going if it didn't make such drastic difference to my browsing experience.
An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
Portainer - For docker containers.
AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.
HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation
SearXNG - private search.
Whoogle - private search.
Shaarli - Bookmarks.
youtube-dl - downloading videos.
PaperlessNGX - document storage.
Trilium Notes - notes app
These are the ones I can't live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.