1y ago

What can the 'average Joe' start hosting, that will change their life?

I'm already hosting pihole, but i know there's so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!

Edit: Thanks all! I've got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!

677 comments

As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:
Paperless_ngx
ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts...). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to "scan" it, upload it, then bin the paper.
An actual life change that i didn't know i needed.
- Oh nice, thanks!
  https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
- Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?
  edit: looks like scans are saved as pdf’s. Thanks for the insight!
  
  It creates searchable PDFs, so no weird format locked to paperless-ngx
  
  The files are stored in a directory and you can define the default path with an environment variable ( file-name-handling ). If you need a more fine graint solution you can also use storage paths and select it on file level ( storage-paths ). I'm using syncthing to sync the folder structure to my other devices.
  
  yeah, and it will order them in a configurable manner, based on dates, tags, people, etc. and as things change in the meta-data of the document, it moves/renames the file to suit.
- And if you try paperless and don’t like it, docspell is another great option.
- That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn't have e.g. OCR features, it's pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!
  
  definitely try it out. You can auto-ingest from the scanner folder and it will do all the rest of the sorting for you. I go in every few weeks/months and look at the recent documents to sort and fix up any meta-data/sorting.
- Commenting here to save this and also to create engagement.
  
  did you know that you can save a post, by clicking the star?
  also, appreciate the engagement :D
  
  I also am creating engagement.
  
  I also am creating engagement.
- Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I've tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven't managed to get what's better about it. I know i'm missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i'd be more likely to out in the work to transition.
  
  well, there are a few things:
  using the app to take photos (in a scan sort of mode, where it trims it to be at right angles), really quick and easy, no matter where i am.
  remote access - i can view all of my documents where ever i am.
  easy & sophisticated search. I have my documents assigned to people (me, wife, child, etc). I also assigned them to things like payslips, tax, shares, legal documents, education docs, receipts, etc. it also helps to automatically tag them to some degree of accuracy
  Automatic dating, it is quite good at picking out the date of the document, as seperate to the upload date. and it is easily updatable if it is wrong
  OCR - the documents content is searchable!
  Ease of tax time. I have some financial year views that make it really easy for me to do my tax (Australia), and i dont need to go hunting for paper that has faded in the heat and is no longer legible.
  folders - the documents are placed in a folder structure of your choosing. if you change the details in the document meta-data, it will move it to the correct place.
  so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!
- Without even opening I had this in mind.
- How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?
  
  Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless "inbox".
  
  Yep, supports upload folder, normal upload in the application and also automatically importing from email based on folder/label
  
  i use the app, it is essentially a photo which is resized/shaped to be a rectangle.
- Saved for futures reference
- Yo this shit is awesome. Going to be setting this up asap.

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
  
  Same here, 192tb, but sonarr, radarr, plex, and the source that shall not be named (I respect the 2 rules).
  It's not about outlay, I can watch what I want, when I want, how I want, without anyone tracking, even wrote my own video player interface in python so the mouse buttons handle all the settings.
  Completely ruins you for normal media :/
  
  Is it useful without piracy though? It would still be expensive to buy all that media? And usually you can’t even download movies etc that you buy online. Am I missing something?
- Other than Disney stuff, you can't really guarantee on your kids favorite show or movie always being available on a streaming service you're already paying for. Jellyfin has been great for those moments. Used to use Plex, and it's very good software, but I got tired of the non-free aspects. Made me feel like I was subscribing to one more streaming service.
  
  But also kind of with Disney stuff, too
- Probably an ignorant question but the content you use is pirated right? Should I wonder about legal issues since I would keep it at home and connected to Internet? Protected of course I just don't see too deep into the issue
  
  If you don't explicitly set a DNS to allow access from outside the local network, all your stuff is private and confined within your local network. As it is with all, let's say, wifi stuff that goes on in your home.
  Edit. What @notorious said

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.
  
  Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren't a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.
- I’ll second this, it’s a great thing to have around and there is always something to tinker this. It’s basically a new hobby though if you like automation and monitoring things so budget your time and money accordingly haha.

Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅

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.
  
  Why though? Just host it in your private network and use a VPN for occasional syncing.
  
  Vaultwarden is super easy. I've not had a single problem with it and I've been running it for a couple years.
- This is a great one and to add it also allows for secure notes, 2FA and sending files securely.
- I second this, bonus points if you get a domain through Cloudflare and use their tunnel service to access shrike away from home!
- yeah, password manager for me. love it. I am looking at using the home assistant addon to manage it now, it may make life a little easier.
- This was going to be my suggestion!

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.
- I feel like this one needs to be higher up. It so immediately and instantly changes your browsing experience (especially on a phone), that I VPN into my own home network when I’m out just to stay on the PiHole.
  Plus, when you get further along in your selfhosting journey you can use the custom DNS to re-route domain names so you never need to leave your network to use your own services.
- Any reason to use PiHole over something like Adguard DNS?
  
  For me, at least, is a custom CNAME DNS record. I've both internal (point to device directly) and external (via reverse proxy) domains. I use a CNAME record to point the external domain back to the internal one for my local split DNS. Technically it can be applied on Adguard; not as easy as PiHole though.

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:
Maps
Calendar
Email
Markdown editor (I'm using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
I haven't tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
a bunch of other stuff I've never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.
- My experience has been that Nextcloud can do 1000 different things, and it sucks at all of them.
  
  That's a little harsh but I definitely agree it doesn't tend to offer a better or equal alternative to any free options available. You're giving up a certain level of ease of use.
  
  I tried setting up nextcloud. Just ended up creating a samba share instead.
  
  I’m not getting Microsoft Office or Apple quality mail clients, or word editors, but the fact that it’s always available to me is enough to make the trade off worth it. YMMV
  
  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
- Ive run NC in one way or another for years now, and switching to a docker-compose stack was an absolute gamechanger for upgrades and break fix ease.
- Nextcloud is the Wordpress of cloud storage. You can customize it to do literally everything. You can even write your own plugin if necessary. But unlike Wordpress, the default setup is quite locked down (you can't just drop php files somewhere and have it accessible to reduce security risk) and you'll actually have to follow certain formats and standards when writing a plugin, unlike the free-for-all every-man-for-himself nature of wordpress plugin development.
- I had a lot of trouble setting up nextcloud in the past but if you go with the Docker method, it's really easy.
- Carnet to replace google keep notes
  
  Is that a nextcloud plugin?
- Yes, Nextcloud. It's not perfect, but it has made my life easier for the last few years
- It's a lot of pain to set up, but Nextcloud with OnlyOffice is just great for editing documents collaboratively and in realtime on the web. Actually one of the things that works better than O365's web editors.
  Some of my notes here if anyone wants them
  
  The problem with OnlyOffice is that it doesn't allow for editing from Android, because then you'll have to pay, which is why I switched to Collabora Office.
  
  nice wiki!
- Absolutely this. Nextcloud brings so much stuff to the table, it's just awesome.
- If you wanna replace google docs the onlyoffice nextcloud integration is excellent

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.
- immich
  Did they just nick the Google Photos UI?
  
  Yes its basically selfhosted Google Photos instance kinda thing. There is a great story the Dev shared once, he was paranoid about backing up things to Google or Apple cloud as they have history of sharing it with Feds. So Dev won't like his family pictures on such platforms, so when him and his partner were to have a baby, he started working on immich, so by the time baby arrives he'll have a safe platform to backup family pictures.
- Plex is a far better and user friendly version than jellyfin or emby in my experience especially if you want to share to friends. Granted it's not open source and has gone commercial route so there is the risk it will continue there. But for now I wouldn't push to move. If jellyfin can get some more app support and continue to develop and be ready for when Plex messes up then it will take off.
  
  True for users who are already setup with Plex, for them there is no reason to switch as of now, but for a person starting from scratch and setting up things for the first time, it makes a lot of sense to get Jellyfin instead of going Plex. As Plex is moving away from their core of making user's media available for streaming, and rather focuses in pushing its own streaming content (I know we can toggle that behavior off but it is headache fot new comers, and it should be off by default and if a person likes they can turn on Plex's streaming content, default should be the user's content)
  
  It's also not fully self hosted.
  
  if you want to share to friend
  Not if they need their own Plex Pass for so many features. The only thing Jellyfin lacks is user self password resets and transcoded downloads. I don't really see any other advantages in Plex
- Does duplicati have to do periodic full backups?
  I've used borgbackup / borgmatic. One full backup and only incrementals thereafter.
  
  Okay, so do I did some digging and there is a good news for you. Though it is incremental after 1st go, and there is no way to change it, I checked. Here, these incremental backups are not the traditional incremental backups we know of. They work a little different and no backups are dependent on each here.
  For more details checked the answer in forums by lead Dev : https://forum.duplicati.com/t/backup-type-is-incremental/8786/3?u=fedonr
  And also here it is by a Contributor who manages their documentation: https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati/issues/3182#issuecomment-382128082
  
  I have only seen incremental from 2nd go, but I'll check if there is a option to switch that and make it full backups even after 1st go
- Where do you store your duplicati backups?
  
  I follow the rule of 3 for backups. So I keeps 3 copies of things I like to back up.
  Original (Drive 1)
  Duplicati backups (Sent to drive 2 - Same Machine)
  Using Syncthing I sync The Backup Folder in Drive 2 to a remote Machine
  
  I use borgmatic & rsync.net
- Would you rate CasaOS over something like ProxMox? I know there is a difference in purpose, since ProxMox is about virtualization and CasaOS is about easy hosting of docker instances.
  Do you have an opinion on what is better in the long run for self-hosting?
  
  Is you like to run Multiple OS/VMs on single machine, then Proxmox is your goto, hands down.
  CasaOs is more for people like me, who runs a single OS baremetal and like to have multiple docker instances on that same OS. Basically you need a baremetal Debain or supported Linux OS on which you install CasaOS.
  CasaOs is more like portainer on steroids, as it offers you Appstore like interface to get one click Docker container installation. But also offers you control (for more advanced users) where if you like you can manager containers and can have terminal/ssh access along with option to change default volume maps set by CasaOS.
  One such similar thing to CasaOS is UmbrelOS, please do avoid that, as it only offers one click installations of docker containers with default volume maps (with no way for you to change it) And it lacks all the advanced features to manage containers like in CasaOS. Atleast CasaOs keeps those options hidden away, so once you become a little advanced you can access it.
  
  Is you like to run MultipleVMs on single machine, then Proxmox is your goto, hands down.
  CasaOs is more for people like me, who runs a single OS baremetal and like to have multiple docker instances on that same OS. Basically you need a baremetal Debain or supported Linux OS on which you install CasaOS.
  CasaOs is more like portainer on steroids, as it offers you Appstore like interface to get one click Docker container installation. But also offers you control (for more advanced users) where if you like you can manager containers and can have terminal/ssh access along with option to change default volume maps set by CasaOS.
  One such similar thing to CasaOS is UmbrelOS, please do avoid that, as it only offers one click installations of docker containers with default volume maps (with no way for you to change it) And it lacks all the advanced features to manage containers like in CasaOS. Atleast CasaOs keeps those options hidden away, so once you become a little advanced you can access it.
- Where do you store your duplicati backups?
  
  https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/499987

Swinger parties?

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.

FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one
- Quick question, don't want to highjack the thread. This looks interesting, but I don't understand why I couldn't just install it on my regular laptop running fedora. Why does it need it's own server?
  
  Well you can install it locally and get the web interface via localhost, but if it's a proper server you can access the news from your sources from anywhere and you can also use 3rd party apps in your phone to get a different interface via the API
- This is exactly what I need. Let me do some research on this.
- Any mobile app you use it with?
  
  On iOS, I've had good experience with NetNewsWire and Reeder
- Hey I got FreshRSS self hosted and everything is up and running smooth. Only thing is, for the websites without RSS... how did you get the RSS for those?
  
  I made a blog about this. Make sure to follow it via RSS too ;)
  https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/newsboat-queries-and-freshrss-scraping/
- i use miniflux, anyone have used both and can tell me if I'm missing out on smth :)

Actual Budget I use to track my finance.
Duplicacy for backups to OneDrive and Backblaze
Photoprism as Google replacement
- Immich is also a great Google Photos alternative. Though it is in active development and things may break, I've been thoroughly impressed by it.
- My problem with Actual Budget is it's only a singular currency. I deal with Euro, Dollar, Romanian Lei, British Pound. Having to manually convert each to Dollar, and then have a bit of discrepancy due to price fluctuations made it a no go for me. Have not found a good self hosted finance tracker that works for me yet.
  At the moment I am unfortunately using a proprietary one called Cubux.
  
  For what its worth, Firefly supports multiple currencies, hell I even see a few crypto currencies in the list haha.
  
  That sounds complicated. If you don’t mind sending everything over an app Revolut can perhaps help out?
- Actual Budget looks really good. Does anyone know of something similar that can track investments?
  
  Ghostfolio
- Actual budget looks really nice. Until now I've just been using MoneyFox, but I'll definitely try out Actual budget
  
  I used YNAB which worked great but I want to move as much as I can over to my own server. The development is going really fast at the moment.
- Actual Budget looks fantastic. And they claim they'll implement direct import soon. I need a YNAB alternative
  
  I've been hunting for a YNAB equivalent and alternative for years since they went subscription based. This looks to fill that hole.
- I'm using PhotoView instead of Photoprism, my RPI4 could handle it better. Just an alternative :)
  
  Does it also have face detection?
- Welp, I went down the wonderful hole of Actual today. Thank you for that!
  Let’s see if it takes over from my xls. I’m liking it. It’s quick and I see lots of potential.
- Actual Budget looks fantastic. And they claim they'll implement direct import soon. I need a YNAB alternative
  
  Yeah. My banks all work with direct import. Even banks that YNAB did not support.

Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:
AdGuard Home is IMHO so much easier to use, although it has been a while since I've used Pi-Hole.
CouchDB for the Obsidian LiveSync plugin
Immich for a self hosted Google Photos alternative
Nginx Proxy Manager for exposing all of my services
Vaultwarden is invaluable for us

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.
  
  and now have zero downtime.
  You mean your service availability is better than five nines??

An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I've forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.
- I should get back into RSS. I used to follow a ton of web comics way back in the day, but once google RSS shut down I never picked it back up. I'll look into Miniflux, thanks.

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.
- I was thinking about doing this but you can be a suspect on a criminal case if Tor is relaying ilegall activities.
  
  Therefore the "life changing" aspect of it
- Also worth noting, you don't have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.
- Also worth noting, you don't have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.

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
- Years ago I selfhosted Nextcloud and found this interaction just as clunky as using google drive. Now I'm just using SFTP which has much less overhead and it integrates beautifully with just about any file manager on Linux. Then again, using it on windows is a pain as far as I know.
- Do you happen to know if it can be installed on Docker for Windows?
  
  probably, docker is docker, should work independently of the host OS
  
  While there is a docker version for windows (server I believe) the last time I checked it could only run windows containers (so basically none). The Linux support never got out of beta. I think now they are just saying use windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) for that.
  I have been quite happy with docker on a Linux virtual machine hosted on a windows server (I know not the "normal" way to do it but since I am a windows Server admin at work it worked best for me).
  The reason that you cannot run Linux containers on windows by default is that docker is no full fledged virtualization Software it sill uses the kernel of the host system. And a Linux container needs a Linux host system.
- Docker is definitely worth the time investment.
  If OP wants to go one level deeper: Ansible.
  
  Does ansible make sense for a single server? I like the concept but I don't know if It makes sense for my purpose.

For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.
It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.
A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.
For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.
- I always like the idea of home assistant, but I haven't figured out a practical automation for my home. Maybe you can share some of your most useful automation?
  
  Sure. I don’t have many enabled right now but some that I’ve used that are probably useful to others
  I have a zigbee smart lock that was relatively cheap but didn’t have a sensor on it to detect if the door is open or closed, just a timer built in. To make the lock smarter so that it won’t attempt to lock if the door is open, I’ve used a $10 aqara sensors to detect if the door is opened or not and then combined those with the door lock to say, trigger a door lock after 5 minutes of the sensory closing, but only if the door isn’t opened again.
  Another Aqara sensor automation that I don’t use any more as we moved to a house that has a carport rather than garage, but I used a contact sensor on my ‘dumb’ garage door to detect if the door was open or not. If the garage door was opened, the garage light would go on. Could do this other ways such as with motion sensors etc but unlike a motion sensor this would keep a light on until the door closed.
  I have a robotic vacuum that I would automatically turn on when every person left the house. If someone was detected returning within a KM of the home, the robot would then return to the dock so it was out of the way when people got home. I really really loved this automation, but I haven’t used it since having kids 4 years ago as there has inevitably been too many toys etc that the vacuum would pick up now days. If your floor is relatively tidy but, it’s a great way to do a vacuum.
  I haven’t explored it yet but Home Assistant pulls in my data from my solar panels and battery. In theory I could probably automate some of my appliances based on power generation or battery charge. Haven’t explored that fully yet however.
  Those are some thoughts. Right now I use it mostly to bridge devices that otherwise don’t talk together or integrate with HomeKit. Haven’t played around with the automations for a bit, but meaning to go in and have a play with it more at some point. It’s a product I tinker with for a few weeks then let simmer for months before coming back too.
  
  You can use it for the most basic of things and build from there. My first automation was turning off all the lights around my home at bed time (triggered by a button which makes it less automation and more remote control I guess). From there the bug bit me and I do all kinds of crazy stuff now.
  The most practical is my load-shifting power automations. My power company has a rate plan that rewards you with really cheap power if most of the time in exchange for not using power during peak times. I selected this plan and automate a near-complete shutdown of the electrical systems in my home during peak times - the A/C goes off, the water heater goes off, the pool pump off, nearly everything except for lights. Total house power use during this time goes to like 400watts as a result. It has saved me hundreds on my power bill, even with adding an electric car that needs to charge every night!
  The most magical is likely the automations around my bed. Both going to bed and getting out of bed are detected and magical stuff happens. When the first person gets into bed (either my wife or myself) almost nothing happens other than the lights dimming in the bedroom to get ready for sleep. Once the second person is in bed a bunch of things happen - all of the lights in the house go off, the doors lock (if they weren't already), the garage doors close (if they weren't already), the security system arms for "Home mode", the HVAC systems go into eco mode outside of the sleeping areas, and a toggle is set for "Sleep mode" that allows me to have other automations make decisions based on it (like if an interior motion sensor turns on a light during sleep mode, the light is turned on at a low dim mode). When the first person gets out of bed after our wake up time of 06:00 the coffee maker will start brewing. Once the second person is out of bed the sleep mode is disabled and most of the home systems return to normal.
  Another favorite is the nightlight mode for my kids. Their bedrooms are on opposite ends of a hallway with a shared bathroom in the middle. During sleep mode, if one of them opens their door at night, the lights on their side of the hallway will turn on to a very warm color and very dim, but plenty to walk by. The bathroom lights also turn on dimly and everything automatically turns off a few minutes after motion stops being detected.
  I've got tons of stuff related to motion detection for security and such too. It's really a sickness once you get into it. I can't stop sometimes... send help...
  
  My cats like to look out our bedroom window in the morning. We have smart blinds. So I use an Ikea motion sensor to tell when one of my cats goes near our bedroom blinds and one of the blinds then opens just enough for them to look outside.
  Another is we have indoor security cameras to spy on said cats when we're away. But when we come home, I use Home Assistant to turn the cameras to face the wall and when we leave, it turns the cameras to face the rooms.
  
  Home assistant isn't only for automations! I just use it as the smart hub for my house in general. I control all my lights and other smart home devices through the home assistant dashboard, it's just like having one centralized app instead of many individual apps for every smart home device.
  I use the esphome intergration to make my own diy smart home devices, and so much more.
  Really if you have any interest in a "smart home" or using any smart home products on a reoccurring bases I'd say home assistant is worth getting into.
  
  My favourite one solved a long-standing argument between my wife and I. I like to keep my office slightly warmer than the rest of the house, and she hates wasting electricity by heating it when I'm not there. She would keep lowering the thermostat when I was not working (like on the weekends), and I'd come back on Monday and wonder why I'm freezing in front of my computer.
  I solved it with Home Assistant and a smart thermostat. Now whenever my computer becomes active, it sets the thermostat to my favourite temp, and when it's asleep (or away) for more than 15 minutes, it sets it back to the "away" temp. Lights are also synchronized with the whole thing.
  
  In my case: door is unlocked + nobody in the hallway -> notification. State of the door lock accessible via app is nice by itself (did I close the door?).
  Generally anything you want to do at home, but often forget.
  
  There's a thread full of people's favourite automations here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/467348
  
  It's not the most complicated, but it's nice.
  Ceiling motion sensor above the stairwell leading to second floor that activates hue bulbs in the upstairs hall. Depending on the time of day it turns on for different lengths of times/brightness and at night for 2 min to red to allow easy travel without upsetting eyes adjusted for darkness.
  That and a similar one that we activate via our echos called "Bedtime for babies" that dims all the lights to have our little one start winding down.
- Same! HA is a really interesting thing to get into. I moved to it from Domoticz, which is easy to get going but you hit some hard limits after a while.

WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don't want to expose while you're out.

Parties.

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.
- My biggest fear of hosting my own important data is losing it to some hardware failure. Currently I mitigate this issue by mirroring my NAS data to onedrive (with encryption)
- I've tried this once or twice but always end up not using it because I don't trust myself to keep a server up.
  Would you consider hosting your own Nextcloud through a provider like Hetzner a nice intermediary step?
  
  Yes. Hetzner's offering is reliable and not too expensive. You do trade off a lot of the privacy and flexibility though.
  
  Just got to have a backup. I have children so for pictures anything Google is just not doable. Nextcloud on my home NAS, nightly backup to Amazon Glacier (super cheap to store because it's expensive to retrieve) in case of a catastrophic failure (like fire). Every month or so backup the files to an external drive.
- Just make sure to keep a backup. Google has them (effectively), you should too.
- While I like this suggestion I’d be careful if you’re just getting started: you don’t want to end up losing data if this is your only copy. Make sure to have proper backups if you have data you can’t afford to lose. You could even encrypt it and upload it to Dropbox/google drive
- Oh this sounds amazing. Do you have a link with more info so we can check it out?
  
  If you do this make sure you have a good backup solution in place. Don't be like me running a nextcloud instance on a single disk server and when the disk died I lost everything. I've since moved to a parity based backup solution.
  
  Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/
  Setup with Docker: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker

After what happened to imgur and gfycat, definitely their own image hosting service.
- What happened to Imgur?
  Any suggestions for Docker?
  
  Imgur is preparing to wipe old uploads that aren't linked to an account...
  In my case, that's pretty much every image I ever uploaded to Reddit using Sync for Reddit.
  
  I'm not sure this is what you're asking because Immich is more like Google Photos instead of imgur, but that's what I use.
  
  Depends on what you want from it, but maybe XBackBone ?
  
  Look at Immich. Great image hosting and the Docker is really easy to set up

Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.
We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there's a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn't need to be always on whenever we leave the room.
Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.

Pi hole
Syncthing(was able to replace Dropbox for my keepass database when they decide to limit number of devices for free tier) - perfect for regularly updated files and backups for photos, etc.
Audiobookshelf - great way to manage audiobooks, also has a nice android app plus can turn each audiobook/series/collection of books into RSS and put in your favorite podcast app
Plex/Jellyfin for media collections
- Audiobookshelf is amazing, especially combined with myanonymouse. Killer combination, absolutely recommend.
- +1 for syncthing.
  If my pc fails right in the middle of some serious work, I will be no longer in despair. I will simply use my second machine to finish it, and repair the main one later.

I started with Plex, but I would say it wasn't until I spun up Nextcloud and got it running that I really would say my life changed. My entire family now has Nextcloud accounts, a family calendar, instant upload of pictures from my phone, all my recipes, and I even have OnlyOffice document server running for editing documents in Nextcloud.
- Did you do anything special to get onlyoffice working? I’ve tried numerous times to add OO to my nextcloud, and it’s never worked for me. It’s the one thing I’m missing that would let me move my wife off of google.

I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.

A NAS or Nextcloud or some other way of having files available remotely.
Having a big box with a lot of storage that you can put things on from anywhere is so incredibly useful.

If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!

The one that was lifechanging for me is audiobookshelf. I LOVE having full ownership and control over all of my audiobooks, and the ability to enjoy them on any device I choose.
- This with anonymouse has been a game changer

DNS. It's always DNS
- for better or worse it is, (though I don't recommend newcomers to boot up a bind server to manage their dns, pihole is probally the best starting point)
  
  Indeed, dnsmasq would be much easier to handle than BIND OOTB. I have personally not come across a reason to use BIND for myself, and struggle to see its appeal out of the enterprise/enterprise-like labs, but I don't really know much about homelabbing either

I’d recommend you to look up *arr stack and Jellyfin. Good start is Trash guides. It will guide you step by step on how to properly set it up. It can completely replace Netflix and all other streaming services and its all free.

We recently set up a magic mirror (showing public transport connections/time/calendar/weather information) on a raspberry pi 3b. But it involved some more fiddling with electronics and software.
(Maybe an alternative would also be possible using small oled (128x64 pixel) screens)
Would be my suggestion if you are up for a challenge =)
We also used to host our own nextcloud, but decided to move it to hetzner as the pricing was unbeatable..
Else a pihole would also have been my suggestion. Maybe a Kodi mediacenter is also worth looking into.

These are some things I recommend. Vault warden. (paswoord manager). Jellyfin. (a great web based media player).. Portainer

For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi

A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee

Let me throw in Paperless NGX, https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

syncthing works on every device and substitutes for cloud storage services. pictures taken with a phone end up quickly in the shared folder on my desktop. etc.

Home Assistant.

PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).
https://www.photoprism.app/

Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.

Vaultwarden!!! There's lots of nice things that may or may not be good for you depending on your needs. But vaultwarden is straight up essential.

Calibre docker stack; Calibre Guacamole instance, CalibreWeb, Openbooks set to save to the Calibre autoimport folder, and FBreader hooked to the OPDS endpoint for calibre. Its like having an Amazon Books ecosystem of my own.

I had not heard of openbooks. I'll have to check it out now. Thanks.

It works pretty well. Like I say, if you set the /books folder to the same data folder as calibre, when you download a book, it will autoimport into calibre. It will pop up a dialog for you to save the book locally, just cancel because calibre will have imported the temp file it creates on the filesystem. Then make sure you've set the Calibre Autoimport to delete source files.

Fix the IRC name in the openbooks config below

---

    
version: "2.1"
services:
  calibre:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre:latest
    container_name: calibre
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=America/Denver
    security_opt:
      - seccomp=unconfined
    volumes:
      - ./data:/config
    ports:
      - 7080:8080
      - 7081:8081
    restart: unless-stopped
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true

  calibre-web:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web:latest
    container_name: calibre-web
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=America/Denver
      - DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:universal-calibre #optional
    volumes:
      - ./data/web-config:/config
      - ./data/:/books
    ports:
      - 7083:8083
    restart: unless-stopped
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true

  openbooks:
    ports:
      - 7082:80
    volumes:
      - './data/:/books'
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: OpenBooks
    command: --name <somebullshitnamehere> --persist
    environment:
      - BASE_PATH=/
    image: evanbuss/openbooks:latest
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true

Anyone have a solid how-to for the layman to host their own lemmy instance? I heard it improves browsing a lot.
- Shameless self plug:
  https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
  All you need is a server, a domain, and your DNS records set to your server's IP address. After that, my script takes care of the rest!
  Please let me know if you have any issues! I am constantly keeping this updated based on people's feedback!
  
  Wow, this looks fantastic. Dead easy to use, you thought about ongoing maintenance, and the readme is very detailed, but still beginner friendly.
  This is exactly what I've been waiting for to take the plunge!
  
  I use your script and it's gotten me going just fine, but i do worry what i'll do if you stop supporting the script... by that point i'll hopefully have a lot of history built up and i'd be gutted to lose it at that point.
- Ansible guide. I didn't follow this one myself but the guy who set up my instance said it was pretty easy
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible
  ...or join a smaller instance.
- Or join a smaller instance
  
  I hear geddit.social is pretty neat

Trillium notes and Bitwarden.
The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things
Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.

For me, it was a wiki/knowledge base - I've had dozens over the years as I've tried to find the 'right' one, but I'm currently a fan of @bookstack@fosstodon.org. My brain's not always the most reliable, and so my wiki becomes my 'external brain'. A lot of people are using things like Obsidian/Notion/etc in the same way.
- I'm using obsidian at the moment, but bookstack looks pretty nice. I'll have to look at that more and see if it would be a good replacement. Can I ask what made bookstack your current driver?
  
  The shelves->books->pages metaphor sort of works for me. It lets me categorise my thoughts in a way that works for me. The lead dev is also really communicative, and it's been really easy to deploy and run. I've been meaning to try and find some time to contribute some hacks to it.
  Ideally, I'd love a way to make Bookstack and Obsidian work together...
- That's such a good idea. I may have to look into this. Thank you
- I might decide to try this for bookmarks. My current problem is I collect all info in various bookmarks. Like open source tools > media/office/bookmarks , royaltyfree > music/pictures/movies, cloud services > storage/VPS/dedicated, temp shares > files/images/video etc etc etc
  It ends up with a lot of duplicates because some things fit into multiple categories, I'm at over 3k bookmarks now.
  I am curious if it might work well to use bookstack for that instead. Thank you for the idea.
  
  May I suggest you benotes for that?
  Really happy with it, hast folders, subfolders, tags and search. Still on development, but I like it enough to recommend it every time someone looks for a way to sort their bookmarks

ActualBudget. If you don't already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/

SearxNG for search: https://docs.searxng.org/
You can try it using a public instance if you like, but since installing it is easy and painless, just go for it.
- thanks - open source search - what a wonderful idea! Although duckduckgo is tolerable, I used google without an ad blocker a couple of days ago while setting up a new system - wow - the search results are so full of clutter and garbage that it's practically unusable. Google search was useful once - not now.
  The main reason ChatGPT is popular is simply because it provides information quickly without a gazillion ads and SEO-driven click-chasing nonsense making the internet unusable. There's no "intelligence" beyond a much better and more intuitive information presentation algorithm. OpenAI is just a search-engine reinvented. We need to open source LLMs next.

I'm hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server

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.
- I've recently also discovered Mealie.io which looks amazing, but I'm still in the setup phase of my first self-hosting solution so I can't recommend from personal experience.
- I'll second Tandoor. It's been so easy to use and import recipes that my 70 year old mother figured it out without help.
- Nextcloud has a recipe app as well, and an Android app as well. Haven't used it much but I thought that it worked pretty well for scraping internet recipes.

So, if you don't know yet what you're doing, I wouldn't host anything critical yet, but I'm using:
https://yunohost.org/
And so far, very few troubles. It's a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.

If you are into RPGs Foundry VTT is a great replacement for roll 20 or any of the other virtual tabletops.

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