Fun/interesting things to self host?

Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it's a hackjob of a self-host solution and I'm ashamed of how it works.

To address your examples directly:

Media server: Jellyfin, along with an arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.

Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!

Recipe management: Mealie is the best I've used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.

Other things I have going:

Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn't a good Android app to go with it. I'd like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don't have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it'll give you the video. Here's all the websites it supports.

Parties, dinners, other events.

Off the top of my head:

• Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
• Immich (Google Photos replacement)
• Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
• LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
• Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
• Jellyfin (Primary media server)
• Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
• Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
• Navidrome (Not sure if I'm keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
• Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I'm as tired as I am right now.

I don't see any mention of games so far.

A minecraft server is always a good time with friends, and there are hundreds of other game servers you can self host.

Home Assistant.

If you want smart devices but not the data collection that goes with it, then Home Assistant is your friend. Just be forewarned that it is a seriously deep rabbit hole.

Searxng. Just use a private instance.

Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

Pihole is probably something you've heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven't it's a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

Here is my list:

• Open WebUI to have browser access to ollama
• AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion Web UI to generate images
• HomeAssistant to automate my home
• Immich to backup pictures from family phones and computers and make them accessible like Google Photos
• PeerTube to store and make accessible family videos
• PieFed to access the threadyverse
• Mastodon to do microblogging
• Uptime Kuma to check that all my services are up and running
• Synapse Matrix Server for Text, Video and audio chats with family and friends
• Syncthing to share files

I just found and set up Gameyfin (a play on Jellyfin). Still in the testing it out phase, but I love the idea of a collection of my friends and my DRM free games that we can all share with less reliance on big companies.

Personally:

Nextcloud (file backup and so much more, I use it to backup files from my computer. Might explore some of the other features soon)

Immich (image backup, I use it to back up photos from my camera + phone)

Radicale (CalDAV + CardDAV for calendar and contacts sync)

Forgejo (GitHub alternative, and the backend of Codeberg! I use this as a local backup to my git repos in addition with cloud backup with Codeberg. They work nice together, when you set two remotes per git repo)

Vikunja (to-do list syncing, don't use this anymore as I mostly use Joplin for this now)

Joplin (Markdown editor, supports cloud sync with nextcloud, I use this for both notes and to-dos!)

I used to run ConvertX (to convert any file type, whether it's document, image, video, etc. Think a self-hosted CloudConvert), but I somehow messed up the user permissions and couldn't log in (100% user error on my part), so I didn't bother.

Examples of the type of service I'm looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation... What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

I use:

• Immich for photo hosting
• Jellyfin and navidrome for media (video and audio)
• Calibre and calibre-web for ebooks
• Minecraft server
• Mealie for recipes.
• Home assistant for automation
• Habitica for habit forming
• And I have fpp for my Christmas lights (the application is xlights, fpp is the server that runs the scripts)

All of these I like.

Here are some of the things I self host that I haven't seen mentioned:

• Continuwuity is a chat server that talks Matrix, so you can join the chat rooms of a lot of open source projects or make end to end encrypted private chats
• Forgejo is a self-hosted code forge (github alternative) - very useful
• FreshRSS is a good one if you like to follow blogs, newsletters or pretty much anything 'news'
• Grafana plus VictoriaMetrics and/or Quickwit is very useful for keeping track of the health of all your services
• Homepage is a... homepage for all your services
• Stalwart gives you a mail server. Set it up for any other projects that need to send mail, or as a backup for your emails, contacts or calendars - it's the easiest way to set that up self hosted. Making it suitable as your main email may need more effort (delivery).
• Related to Continuwuity / matrix, you can set up the Mautrix collection of bridges, which let you bridge Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, telegram, and more into your matrix account or chats seamlessly.
• LMS (lightweight Media Server, not to be confused with Logitech Media Server) is an alternative to Navidrome that I find works better with my library tagging and ListenBrainz
• Speakr - audio transcription with diarisation. Very useful if you like to record meetings.

Jellyfin and Immich, first and foremost. From there, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, RustDesk, Docmost, and Nephele.

(Full disclosure: Nephele is my own service. I find it quite useful.)

Home Assistant might be of interest.

Additionally, pi hole, Immich, and things based on your hobbies might be fun. I recently started hosting a Grafana service to send my garmin data to since I like seeing my health data. I know you didn't want grafana, but using a hobby as an example. What are some of your hobbies?

• media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
• photos: immich
• game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you're into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn't open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you'll have on any platform.
• recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
• if you're a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management

Weather station, terrestrial/satellite TV DVR (TVHeadend), Git repository (Forgejo for a nice web UI, cgit for a classic UI), DNS resolver.

If you want to get straight to the fun, I might recommend: https://cosmos-cloud.io/

It will handle all of the uninteresting stuff like docker, reverse proxies, ssl certificates, etc. You can get straight to adding apps either by pasting in a docker-compose, or getting them straight from the cosmos marketplace.

Also, it works with standard tools, so other than the reverse proxy, it's easy to migrate away from if you want. I think the reverse proxy is just caddy, but I don't know where the caddy config file goes or how to pull it out of the funky cosmos config format.

I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself.

Well, you kind of have to have the infrastructure to make the fun happen. Docker is probably one of the more easy to deploy from the standpoint of someone just standing up a server.

• media server: Navidrome is what I use, but there are a plethora of choices
• photos app: Immich is quite popular, but again there are a list of them
• game servers: There are several that I know of like Doom , Minecraft, iirc there is a Quake server, I think you can integrate Steam. I can't run games because of a seizure condition, but maybe others can chime in.
• home automation: HomeAssistant, NodeRed, N8N, Ansible, just literally tons of automation

These and thousands of other apps can be deployed via Docker. You don't have to use docker, you can install on bare metal as well, tho containers make things neat and tidy.

As far as 'fun', to me it's all fun. I selfhost for the utility, privacy, security, and anonymity of it, the educational part of it, and because it's fun. My version of fun is going to vary widely from yours probably, but I find learning quite fun. Sky's the limit pretty much.

AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.

Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.

Headscale with headplane UI for access across servers

Openwebui for LLM stuff with tika for doc processing

Nextcloud for data and such

Immich(migrating away from photoprism) for better photo management and phone upload

Caddy for reverse proxy

Not used as much: Monica for contact management Mealie for its ease of importing recipes

Your own wiki, and your own social media-type service

I post miscellaneous notes to my social media-type service, and save lists and more organised information (including recipes) to my wiki.

My link collector.

An open tor exit node, a proxy to a pedopornographic website, a guide to mass shootings, a wiki on how to get untraced firearms, or a Minecraft server

CalDAV calendar/tasks server s.a. Radicale (with Cfait as a tasks manager/client)

Maybe an IRC server/bouncer

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house---but wg is demanding and it's a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can't do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It's a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

• For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.
• LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.

https://docspell.org/ for organizing your documents using machine learning.

RSSHub. Being able to get all my updates in one place changed how I view the internet for the better.

Adguard Home, with domain pointed to it and using it as Private DNS on Android. No more ads anywhere!

If you have a Nvidia graphics card 1070 and above, then openwebui. You can selfhost your own LLM. AMD is probably supported but haven't checked.

I started with NextCloud, mainly so I can start synchronizing Joplin notes. Maybe I could hook it up to also sync Logseq?

I chose this VTT because it's dead simple and description on owlbear legacy did not sound encouraging

Then, on my list I have

• LibreTranslate
• tootik