I love Immich. I've pulled in all my photos going back to high school in the early 2000s and it's so awesome having a timeline of them.
Big fan of Immich.
I have a couple thousand photos that were taken since around time When blackberry was big and before. Older family photos I’ve scanned. Home videos from vcr tapes. Stuff I wouldn’t want to use up my space on cloud drives but it’s sooo nice having them in Immich and organized.
I have local backups and offsite backup btw, and redundancy in the server itself. But Immich is great. Paid supporter.
Self hosting our budget with Actual has been a game changer for my partner and I. No other budget app really worked for us but this was super easy and the PWAs really make a difference.
Glad to hear people like it because I thought it was really cool....
...But not having that European easy bank import option and having to manually download your sheets and import them is probably why I didn't stick to it very well...
...but then again it imported those sheets like magic so there's that!
Since the last big update you can enable experimental support for enable banking, which support quite a lot of European banks!
Oh sorry, what I meant was there's a standard to do that with European banks, yeah, but US banks don't have it, so you gotta manually download and import stuff. At least that's how it was last I checked.
Something fish, something fin? I forget what it's called, but there was some integration I found for, like, $2/month(?) and it worked pretty well from what I remember. I think this was around 2 or 3 years ago.
Every few years, I try installing Actual Budget, and have my wife compare it to how she uses YNAB, just to see if we can finally make the switch to fully self-hosted. Plus YNAB has become obsessed with new features and new customers while ignoring many of the issues that still haunt those with legacy knowledge of the platform. All while continuing to raise the price.
SimpleFIN, I currently use it and it works well
I had the same issue. Then I found https://sure.am/ . It has easy bank integration amongst others. Been using it for a bit now.
The thing that really kills me with actual budget instead of firefly philosophy differences is that a "budget per month" app needs to have some flexibility with dates and categorization which I don't find in actual budget. At the very least, setting a different "beginning of the month".
I get paid on the 27th-30th of the month, that is my budget for the following month but according to actual budget, that is my budget for the month of money I have already spent. Likewise with bills, I transfer money to an account where all the bills automatically come out of after I get my paycheck, but those are bills coming out of the budget for the following month.
You can't budget with money you don't have yet... Especially for people with variable salaries (Belgium pays money for the days you bike to work, getting expenses paid back, etc...)
If I transfer my bills money on the 1st of the month (last possible day) and then before the 1st of the month the next month, then all metrics and budgeting for 2 months are fucked up and inaccurate with no way to fix it.
I run many of the usual suspects, but I would say Home Assistant is on the top of the list.
apart from the usual suspect like, Jellyfin+Plex (still have some straggler users that need to upgrade their players for JF to work properly), Immich, nextcloud etc, I really like running Birdnet-Go. I give it my CCTV camera feeds and it uses a NN to identify birds it hears.
I get statistics about species heard around the property, charts to correlate detections to seasons and weather, and some interesting info about rarer species that I didn’t know were in my area. Every morning I check it to see if there was anything new recorded.
it doesn’t really have a purpose, though the data can be submitted to larger databases, but it's just a nice thing to have.
EDIT: Also Vaultwarden, forgot about that, super happy to be hosting my own password manager instead of trusting (and paying for) companies like Dashlane to host it like I used to.
bringing you joy is its purpose, and that is valid.
Navidrome for me. I have a physical collection of around 2000 albums across CD, vinyl, and cassette, plus a lot of digitally only purchases over the years. Finally getting it all on my own server and being able to just tap a button to shuffle the entire collection is just about everything I ever wanted.
May I ask why Navidrome over Jellyfin or Plex? I've been considering it, but I have no good reason to switch if it's working right now the way it is.
Mostly because I'm a lot pickier about my music collection than video. There is no chance of Navidrome overwriting my tags. It just doesn't have the ability.
With a large collection (getting up toward 28,000 tracks), I also wanted to make sure that whatever I was using had a comfortable, music first interface. Jellyfin felt cumbersome in contrast to Navidrome.
Mine is my Jellyfin.
With a good few plugins it's gotten to the point now that my Jellyfin is my
Movie Shows And music service
Its been really fun to hunt for blurays of my favorite shows and take the time to rip them and get all the extras labeled.
Same goes for looking at bandcamp and buying CDs again.
I still have some media I liberate.. I mean they won't make blurays of everything sadly.
So hard to pick a favourite. I'm especially proud of having the mail server.
Mail gang in da house.
Everyone should hoat mail. These corps started there for a reason. Take it all back.
Email's probably the most satisfying. I learnt a lot in setting up my own email server, and it's nice being in complete control (well, of my end of things at least, ofc not of the other person's end) of such an essential service.
Damn, never heard anyone enjoy hosting e-mail servers
that's crazy though
I didn't expect to even need a NAS, but I can no longer live without two now. Having all my data in one place, automated backups on my secondary NAS. I found a cloud storage provider I like. Just the whole stack is wonderful and I'm never going back.
My list, starting with most important tools:
baïkal
immich
paperless ngx
copyparty
vaultwarden
netbox
searxng
navidrome+feishin
jellyfin
forgejo
grafana
reitti
cryptpad
bentopdf
grist
rustdesk
If I had to only pick one that is by far Home Assistant.
100%. Home Assistant has proven to be incredibly useful in my house. My wife loves it for the laundry notifications, the fact that I essentially replaced Life360 with it (Traccar, really, but it ties into HA so nicely), and the automated lighting: our basement (the younger kids' play area), and themed lighting for the outdoor lights.
We've been fighting tangled toilet flapper chains over the last few years. The tangled chain keeps the flapper from closing, which causes the tank to continuously run into the bowl, which causes my water bill to skyrocket if gone unnoticed (we have 5 kids, 4 toilets, and the chains get tangled no matter what I do: new chain, longer chain, shorter chain, different type of chain/string/twine, etc... I blame the hard water). I finally got fed up, so I bought and installed a zigbee water level sensor for each toilet tank, then whipped up an automation which notifies us via Android's "alarm_stream" notification channel if a sensor has been dry for longer than a few minutes. That channel overrides DND, and I am going to add an entry to ping my HA Voice thing as well in case we don't have our phones on us.
Just gonna say it.
Stash. Is a great FOSS media management platform for primarily adult content.
It's kinda good the scratch hdd I was using for stash died. I was getting a little too into curating that library and it was changing my relationship with adult content.
10/10 app though, would recommend
Selfhosting porn is the most neckbeard gooner thing I've heard of :))
PieFed and Navidrome
Fediversing with the whole world from my own server while listening to music that no "rights holder" can revoke the license to. It's a liberating feeling.
Everything, from Nextcloud to gaming servers!
I still love getting messages via xmpp from friends and family using my own snikket/ejabberd instances after years of use. Calls as well.
Video conferences via jitsi meet fill my heart with joy since the covid epidemic. These are also xmpp based. It's just a cool lightweight protocol.
XMPP is nice but even with all of the quality of life extensions it definitely feels clunky. I tried switching to it recently from matrix and while matrix leaves a lot to be desired I found it was more useful in its current form than XMPP.
My own art gallery. Started feeling the ick about posting on social media and just moved everything to my own hand-coded home page in Lustre. Feels nice to have a little space that's just mine.
It ain't much, but I'm also pretty proud of my Forgejo+actions setup. Pushing a commit and seeing my services update, knowing it's all happening on "my" (VPS, but still) infra gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling.
Same!! I don't trust other sites to preserve my photography indefinitely, and definitely not in the quality I want, so I built this from scratch https://p.drkt.eu/ and it's just sitting on a box in my living room. Feels nice to watch the traffic tick by in the logs :)
My favorite thing to self host is my RSS feed reader. I'm a huge fan of feedbin but I wanted to self host. I tried the usual self hosted RSS feed readers but I just prefer the way feedbin is laid out and how it works. So, I used Claude to create a self hosted clone of feedbin but with my personal modification to fit my workflow.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| MQTT | Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
[Thread #64 for this comm, first seen 27th Jul 2026, 12:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Plex. Right now we're on vacation and can chill out with our current shows before bedtime, watching on the TV of the relative hosting us. No fuss. Aside from Movies and TV Series it also holds my music collection, Plexamp is awesome.
I've not gotten very deep into selfhosting due to priorities and time but I look forward to trying Immich as well as Home Assistant in the future.
Immich
Jellyfin
HomeAssistant
Dawarich
HortusFox
In that order.
Things like the *arrs, traefik/authelia, etc. are just a necessity and not something that gives back like the 5 mentioned at first.
PiHole on old laptops started the journey for me
Now I've got all sorts of things, most visible are Plex and Audiobookshelf. The most useful to me personally is Headscale for what at I assume are obvious reasons.
I'd like to use Matrix more but that requires some buy-in from friends.
I ostensibly use this as a means of continued education for myself, but really it's because I enjoy using/learning about open-source software and creating my own ecosystem outside of "big tech"
I've got it all set up in a way that really works for me, which is all that really matters in the end.
sftp, few of my friends have access to a shared directory where we upload random stuff
if hosting on a VPS counts:
I was going to come in and say pihole, hands down as it got me into home labbing. But then I got reading some of the responses and my thoughts changed to Home Assistant because I can automate so much. An app that I had purchased to help me stay on top of my medications decided to go subscription so I was able to use HA to set up reminders to take my drugs go off on my watch which I would turn into reminders to do so much more. Than I thought Docker, because it is so much easier to install things with docker. Than I thought OpenWRT because I now have a real firewall that I can do so much more with than my ISPs dinky little thing. I was almost ready to reply when I read your question over again and I saw you mention the *arr stack and Jellyfin, which got me thinking how much I love that. Which reminded me of someone saying immich. I have to go for some blood letting today so I keep my blood req in paperless. I self host nextcloud and that is one thing I am looking at finding alternatives to but all that being said picking one is like picking a favourite family member, sure some you may like more than others but you are never going to tell which one.
Several things. Mosquitto to control an ecosystem of LEGO models, some CALDAV syncer, and a mediawiki engine for D&D worldbuilding.
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.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!