Hi all,

question to you: How many of your selfhosted Apps are improving your life? Which apps are you really using on a daily/weekly basis?

Many of my running containers are just for … running containers.

Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard … they are not improving my life, they are only improving Selfhosting. But we are not doing selfhosting just for the sake of it? Do we? …

Many of my running containers … are getting replaced by Open Source client software eventually

  • I’ve installed Trilium Notes - but I’m using Obsidian (more plugins, mobile apps, easy backup)
  • I’ve installed Vikunja - but I’m using Obisdian (connecting tasks with notes is more powerful)
  • I’ve installed Snapdrop - but I’m using LocalSend (more reliable)
  • I’ve installed Bitwarden - but I’m using KeePass (easy backups, better for SSH credentials)
  • I’ve installed AdGuard - but I’m using uBlock (more easy to disable for Shopping etc.)
  • …

So the few Selfhosted Apps, that improve my life

File Management

  • Paperless NGX - all my documents are scanned and archived here
  • Nextcloud - all my files accessible via WebUI (& replaced Immich/Photoprism with Photos plugin)
  • Syncthing - all my files synchroniced between devices and Nextcloud
  • Kopia - Backup of all my files encrypted into the cloud

And that’s a little bit sad, right? The only “Job to be done” self-hosting is a solution for me is … file management. Nothing else.

What are your experiences? How makes self-hosting your life better?

( I’m not using selfhosting for musc / movies / series nowadays, as streaming is more convenient for me and I’m doing selfhosting mainly because of privacy and not piracy reasons - so that usecase is not included in my list ;)My only SmartHome usecase is Philips Hue - and I’m controlling it with Android Tasker )

  • louislamlam@alien.topBEnglish
    4·
    11 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.

  • dollhousemassacre@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    It’s all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It’s a wonderful mess.

  • gramoun-kal@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There’s a “before paperless” era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

    Now, it’s a solid 100%.

    Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I’d say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I’d still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that’s pretty much the only thing.

  • z0r1337@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Mainly for privacy reason:

    • TeamSpeak
    • Seafile

    And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news…

  • j0hnp0s@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I’d say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

    The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

    I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it’s just a fancy way to tag documents. I don’t need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

  • azukaar@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 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

  • JumpingCoconutMonkey@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Home Assistant, Mealie, and Blue Iris are my daily life improving apps. My kids really enjoy the Ark server too.

    I need to get more use out of my plex setup, but my Fire Cube v1 in the bedroom doesn’t run much reliably anymore.

  • Cybasura@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 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

  • CrustyBatchOfNature@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I started just for funsies, and in the end narrowed it down to just those items that make life better for us. Primarily, I run 2 Technitium DNS (network wide ad blocking), Jellyfin (for media), Home Assistant (to control lights and other devices without internet access), Mealie (recipes), and Ubooquity (books and comics). I have run NextCloud, among other services, but none of them got enough use to make it worth it to continue.

  • WiseCookie69@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 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)

  • Proximus88@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 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@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Obisian

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

    • alexhackney@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 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@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 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
  • einmaulwurf@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 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.