stupid question I know but let me explain. I self host only because I love learning random things and this was just another thing that I convinced myself I needed to learn, not out of necessity. I am hosting an *arr media system right now but that is pretty much the only thing I actually need, I have unlimited google photos so I don’t need Immich, I am happy with bitwarden so I don’t need vaultwarden, don’t need home assistant, nextcloud, bookstack etc so what I should I self host? throw any idea you have at me.
I’d focus more on the infrastructure instead of choosing what apps to run if you want to improve your knowledge. Running an application is easy. Automation, security, observability, etc. is the hard part.
Learn about Ansible, Terraform, GitOps, backup solutions, logging, network security, etc.
Network wide Adblock, using pi hole or AdGuard home
If you’re happy with those services … maybe you shouldn’t?
I self-host because I prefer to house my data locally when possible. It’s easier for backups and I’m not subject to the whims and financial decisions made by a company about whether their service will remain available, what it will cost, what functions it will offer. The tradeoff is work on my part, but I enjoy tinkering and learning.
In my case, I self-host a NextCloud instance for remote access to my docs, a Calibre Web server for eBooks (and to share those with a few trusted friends), a Vaultwarden instance because I’d prefer my vaults not be stored by a company whose servers are likely a major target for bad actors and that could change its TOS or offerings in the future.
Well, YMMV may vary and seems to from the above. But for me self-hosting, especially on home machines, is largely about privacy and reduced cost as well as learning. Google in particular will hover up all data possible and profile you to hell and back selling the results. I used to use Dropbox and a higher price plan to get their [dubious] encryption and so on until I realized I could meet all my needs and more data across multiple machines with a NAS or NFS among other solutions.
You can start by getting out of reddit and hosting your own Lemmy instance. :)
Gaming server? VPN? File-sharing?
And another one too lazy to even use the search, let alone look at the sidebar.
And of course, look at the subreddit sidebar, find the awesome-selfhosted list and work your way through that. There is also a big fat sticky “Please read this first” thread that you ignored.
Hosting only *arr is not the one who insist himself loves to learn definitely…You are just a random guy who does not care about learning and tech at all.
If you really love to learn then you can literally self host anything. You just don’t love it that much.
