Be honest: Are you doing SelfHosting just for the sake of it - or do you have apps, that really improve your daily life?

@Simplixt · 9 months ago

Be honest: Are you doing SelfHosting just for the sake of it - or do you have apps, that really improve your daily life?

@louislamlam · 9 months ago

Uptime Kuma maintainer here. The reason why I made this because I have some services like databases and websites cannot be down for a long time. I need someone send a notification to me if they are down.

If you think it is not improving your life, it is probably because you don’t have such similar scenario and you probably don’t need this indeed.

My point is that it may be not improving your life, but it improves my life at least, or others’. That’s just a choice.

@magshell-alpha · 9 months ago

Self-hosting is great for people who don’t want to pay for software, services, music, movies, etc… but are willing to pay with time.

@azukaar · 9 months ago

I think you’ve stumble accross few of the huge issues with selfhosting

- Developing apps is too hard, you have all the difficulties of SaaS development but with the added difficulty of having to support people installing your app in various setups

- For the difficulty, the return on investment is low because the community is much smaller than what you can touch with a SaaS software

This causes the breadth of available apps to be quite shallow, and additionally, another factor threaten further that diversity is that

- people gets into self-hosting in one of two ways. Either to create illegal media-center (in which case they install Plex, Jellyfin, *arr, download client, etc…) or to manage their document in privacy (Nextcloud, etc…) seems like you are type 2. This causes most projects to focus around those hot topics, without exploring other things (this year alone at least 4 photos albums backup software started development…)

But this state of affair is not sad or inflicting, it is natural for such as a young community to take time to find itself, especially in this difficult setting (I know selfhosting is not new, but I call it young because only recently did it start becoming so popular). And there are solutions to those problem too. On my end, like many other talented people, I am working on technologies to improve this situation, and hopefully one day we will see a large diversity of application growing, with much more accessible setup for people to run.

What I forsee will be big in the future

- Once we crack federation (I do not think current state of the technology is good enough) social app (Video sharing, file sharing, social media alternatives, news site etc…) will be big

- Going back to news, once we improve the QOL of SH for public sites, news agglomeration is going to be big as well (for blogs and stuff)

- Any mobile/SaaS app could have a SH counter part, that will automatically gain benefits from not being in the cloud. Im thinking things like various task management, productivity tools, and of course, home automation is gonna be the bigger winner for being in the home already, therefore workable offline. An example of this is already happening with cooking/recpies apps (Mealie, Tandorii, Grocy, etc…) which benefit from being at home, private, and accessible from the family, and home-assistant.

- Finally, SH is going to supercharge the development of very niche software. It makes no sense to develop an entire SaaS offering for 100 users (ex. a software to manage your model train would be very niche) because you have to pay for a domain, servers, and so on… But a SH app could literally cost $0 to run (for the devs) while yelding minimal benefits (either from subs or donation).

Give it 2-3 years for those stuff to develop better. In 3 years this sub will be almost twice as big at 500k, and you will have 2-3 times the amount of apps available that’s pretty much a garantee

@einmaulwurf · 9 months ago

For me the biggest is probably Jellyfin. Before, I needed to use external drives plugged into my TV, then browse them using the TVs file browser. I didn’t see which movies I already watched, or at which episode I stopped. When I wanted to watch something on my computer, I had to get the drive and plug it in there. The same for when I wanted something new. Now, I have Jellyfin running on my server, all the clients have access to it and I can watch my stuff whenever and wherever I like. It’s also easier to share something.

@WiseCookie69 · 9 months ago

I host it to have my own data under my own roof.

Nextcloud (everything from pictures, over tax stuff to my keepass database)
Matrix server (even more important with every government on this planet pushing against encrypted messengers)
PiHole, that i can also use via DoH from my phone
Traccar instance to keep an eye on my car, when it’s in for service / maintenance / when i’m abroad
…

I’ve worked in the hosting industry. I’ve witnessed an internal breach, where an employee abused access over a few corners and fetched files matching a certain pattern from all customer VPSes (Virtuozzo container based VPSes have their root filesystem accessible from the host)

@ro55mo · 9 months ago

Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, local storage and email are used constantly. All bring great improvements.

Ansible and Zabbix provide ‘support’ for these applications.

Media streaming is a ‘nice to have’ but not essential. Wireguard is seldom used but still very important.

@Tibuski · 9 months ago

Selfhosted services I couldn’t do without anymore are :

At Home

Homer
Home Assistant
Vaultwarden
Paperless-ngx

At work

Promotheus/Blackbox/Grafana
Netbox
Gitea
Vaultwarden
Mkdocs Material

@AnApexBread · 9 months ago

Both. I have things that I host simply for fun, but most of my homelab is for experimentation.

I practice with different technologies so I can try to learn how they work.

@Cybasura · 9 months ago

Started out with a simple samba file server for remote editing

Then expanded into ipsec+ l2tp vpn server, then into ipsec + ikev2, then into wireguard vpm server and its been expanding ever since

Never stopped since then

@NikStalwart · 9 months ago

I am legally blind. I got into programming and linux specifically so that I can improve my life, even though I don’t want to pursue an IT career professionally.

So, the short answer to your question is: most of my apps really do improve my daily life. And a good many of them I wrote myself.

Here’s a largely-arbitrary mind dump:

Windows, unfortunately, has the best on-screen magnifier, so I cannot entirely leave the platform.
However, most GUI apps and web pages suck. They suck in many fascinating ways that are beyond the scope of this comment, but I have found that some tasks are quicker to perform from a CLI than from a GUI. For instance, managing documents. I can write a shell oneliner faster than I can load a GUI app for bulk file renaming or whatever other thing people tend to do. I can tell gnuplot to produce a graph much faster than I can draw one by hand.
Until very recently there wasn’t a Dark Mode for word processors. So I’d just write Markdown files in VS Code and then convert with pandoc.
Math is much easier with scripting than with calculators
Text to speech is a lifesaver. And sometimes you need to write your own whacky scripts to scrap webpages and read them out to yourself.
I need to conform to academic referencing standards. Who’s got time for that? Nobody. Computers can do that for me.
Web scraping — some websites are so bad, the only way to use them is to scrape then convert.

But that’s from an accessibility perspective and more programming than self-hosting per se.

Now from reading your OP, I think it is an attitude problem rather than a selfhosting problem. uBlock Origin and AdGuard (blocky, in my case) are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how TF to use them. Since I use uBlock in Paranoid Mode (basically a lite uMatrix mode with filterlists), I don’t need to block so-called tracker scripts at the DNS level. My DNS adblocker is only blocking ads. Ergo, things like shopping do not break. You are saying that it is easier to disable uBlock for shopping — but I can change DNS with one script. Just temporarily switch to 1.1.1.1 or something, and everything works. Where’s the problem?

I’m not sure what your complaint is with Bitwarden. It is not exactly hard to back it up when it is running in docker, and easier still if you use vaultwarden (much simpler backend).

You say that you use ‘Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard’ and they are not improving your life.

I’ll agree on the first two, but maybe that’s just because I hate webuis with a burning passion. But how are Authentik and Wireguard not improving your life?

Do you know why I use wireguard? I’ll tell you why I use wireguard.

A long time ago, I needed to go to hospital. I also had a university assignment due the same day as I was in hospital. Thought to myself, ‘no problem, I’ll just bring my laptop with me; I’ve got Google Drive Sync set up so I can work on my files remotely’. So I check in, boot up, log in, and what do I see? Old files. Old files from three weeks ago. Why? Because Google Drive decided to go on strike and, in true GUI App fashion, displayed a tiny error notification in the tray icon that you would need a microscope to see. Naturally, being half-blind, I didn’t see it. So now I am, figuratively up shit creek without a paddle!

So what do I do? Well, I deploy “KVM over Mom”. I ask my mom to drive back home — mind you, this is a 70-minute drive — and get her to bring my machine up. I walk her through getting into my machine and resurrecting Google Drive Sync. And then I spend 4 hours in the hospital queue finishing off my assignment.

That episode taught me a few things:

Google sucks but I have to live with it
KVM-over-Mom is not a viable long-term solution
I need remote access
Redundancy is good.

So, fast-forward a few months and I am using my dad’s NAS as a jumphost/proxy into our home network, where I can use wake-on-lan and RDP to connect to my machine. I have also switched from Google Drive Sync to File Stream (as it then was) so that my files are automatically available in gdrive. And that latter bit saves my ass some months later when my dad’s NAS has a disagreement with a kernel update and I can no longer remote in. We also have a hoard of Chinese bots hammering away at our internet-facing 16-year-old router, so that’s not great either. Also, ssh tunnels are neat, but are annoying to configure.

Fast forward a few years and an Unspecified Virus of Unspecified Origin that temporarily obviated the need for remote access, I now use a VPN. In fact, me being a somewhat cautious person, I use several VPNs, for remote access into my home network. There is a vanilla wireguard “in case things with multiple moving parts break” tunnel and more convenient mesh orchestrators, although I have a hard time finally deciding between innernet and headscale.

And does having remote access to my home computer improve my life? Yes. Most definitely. My home computer and server have much more storage than does my laptop. And sometimes you just need access to your copy of Hanks Australian Constitutional Law 12th ed, what can I say…

The issue I see with many self-hosters is that they start with a solution looking for a problem as evidenced by the frequent “I am bored, tell me what to selfhost” posts we see on this sub. It is much better to start with a problem and try to solve it. Then you don’t have to have an existential crisis over whether you are hosting too many replicas of postresql…

:wq

@Toutanus · 9 months ago

For serious business :

Jellyfin
Paperless-ng
Mealie (only MY receipes)
Home assistant (cool stuff with domotic)
Yourls
ruTorrent
ytdl_api_ng (download videos directly on my server)
pihole (bye bye most of ads)
gitea
seafile (more reliable than nextcloud)
overleaf (easier to install on docker that install a LaTeX distribution on all my computers)
Deemix
Custom backup report
Custom uptime report

For the lol :

Aria 2 (no real usage for me)
Nextcloud (bad desktop client, gave up, still useful to share some files)
Wikijs (to lazy to maintain documentation)
Memos (can’t replace google keep)
Portainer (I manage things manually)
Webmin (for some dangerous things only)

I almost disabled everything else.

@IWishIHavent · 9 months ago

For me, it’s a mix of utility, hobby and learning.

I’m a software developer putting my toes into DevOps. I’m using Raspberry Pi for this and other projects. And I have some songs saved through the years not on Spotify, and videos I would like to make accessible easily.

@root_switch · 9 months ago

I’m also in your shoes but backwards, devops/sysops to software/web dev (as a hobby). I have 3 raspberry pi’s in a docker swarm. I use the shit out of gitea, hastypaste, transfer.sh, localstack, bookstack, and I’ve just started building my own containerized apps!

@virtualadept · 9 months ago

Everything I self host I use each and every day (every other day, if I’m busy). I don’t keep stuff hanging around just because.

@Proximus88 · 9 months ago

Both, i like setting up the network and trying out selfhosted services.

Definitely improved my daily routines:

- Paperless-ngx, connected to my email. All my bills and purchases are backed up. So easy to find documents/warranty documents.

- Nextcloud, for backing up my phone and personal life. Too much data for cloud providers and pivate.

- Plex/Jellyfin, easy way to watch all my Linux iso’s without paying 10 different streaming services. Still subscribed to two steaming services though (family).

- Adguard, lifesaver to browse the web without going crazy.

- Immich, awesome photo viewer with mobile app.

- Syncthing, awesome tool to sync data. Use it to sync my Obisian notes to all my devices.

- Kasm/webtop, have my own OS in browser to access from any web browser securely.

- Restic, tool to backup everything to Backblaze. You can use any storage solution.

- Wireguard VPN, to easy access my services and have adblocking on my phone and laptop outside of my LAN.

@scotrod · 9 months ago

Obisian

Hey, may I ask what application you use on your smartphone to view the markdown notes?

@Proximus88 · 9 months ago

Obsidian, misspelled the app. There is a iOS and Android app.

@alexhackney · 9 months ago

I have paperless running in a docker container on my unraid machine but it seems like it takes longer to use then what I used to do.

I used to save all files to a folder system

Docs -> Year -> date-sender.pdf

Now it seems I have to manually do all of the coding. I thought that paperless, would learn who files are from and then categorize it for me, so that if I scan all my monthly bills and then 2 years later I need to find my internet bill for Dec 2019, I could just search for it and find it.

While the search will work, it only works if I scanned it, tagged it spectrum and put the date on it. Seems like its more work to me?

@Proximus88 · 9 months ago

I run paperless-ngx in a docker container. Have it scan my email for attachments once a day. It automatically tags the email depending on keywords found in the email and sender.

If I scan a document to import I tag it manually.

But paperless-ngx also has ocr, so it will scan the whole page and save that data. So I can search for example ‘samsung’ and it will show me all documents where Samsung is in. Even if it is not tagged.

My docker-compose:

version: "3.3"

networks:
  paperless:
       name: paperless
       driver: bridge
       ipam:
        config:
          - subnet: 172.36.0.0/16

services:
  paperless-redis:
    container_name: paperless-redis
    image: docker.io/library/redis:7
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - paperless
    volumes:
      - ./redis:/data
   

  paperless-db:
    container_name: paperless-db
    image: docker.io/library/postgres:13
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - paperless
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: paperlessdb
      POSTGRES_USER: paperless
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: super-secure-password

  paperless:
    container_name: paperless
    image: ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - paperless
    depends_on:
      - paperless-db
      - paperless-redis
    ports:
      - 8002:8000
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-fs", "-S", "--max-time", "2", "http://localhost:8000"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 5
    volumes:
      - ./data:/usr/src/paperless/data
      - ./media:/usr/src/paperless/media
      - ./export:/usr/src/paperless/export
      - ./consume:/usr/src/paperless/consume
    env_file: ./docker-compose.env
    environment:
      PAPERLESS_REDIS: redis://paperless-redis:6379
      PAPERLESS_DBHOST: paperless-db

The .en file you can find on there GitHub. But the over important part is to setup a language for it.

# The default language to use for OCR. Set this to the language most of your
# documents are written in.
PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE=nld

@gladwrap1205 · 9 months ago

Rely on a lot of my selfhosted stuff like my media stack, immich, syncthing (phone backups), home assistant, vaultwarden. Saves me a bunch of money from subscriptions