What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.

Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.

Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Jellyfin and Immich, first and foremost. From there, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, RustDesk, Docmost, and Nephele.

    (Full disclosure: Nephele is my own service. I find it quite useful.)

  • ArchEngel@lemmy.caEnglish
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    1 month ago

    I just found and set up Gameyfin (a play on Jellyfin). Still in the testing it out phase, but I love the idea of a collection of my friends and my DRM free games that we can all share with less reliance on big companies.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 month ago

    • For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.

    • LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.

  • ohlaph@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Home Assistant might be of interest.

    Additionally, pi hole, Immich, and things based on your hobbies might be fun. I recently started hosting a Grafana service to send my garmin data to since I like seeing my health data. I know you didn’t want grafana, but using a hobby as an example. What are some of your hobbies?

  • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

    I use:

    • Immich for photo hosting
    • Jellyfin and navidrome for media (video and audio)
    • Calibre and calibre-web for ebooks
    • Minecraft server
    • Mealie for recipes.
    • Home assistant for automation
    • Habitica for habit forming
    • And I have fpp for my Christmas lights (the application is xlights, fpp is the server that runs the scripts)

    All of these I like.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Weather station, terrestrial/satellite TV DVR (TVHeadend), Git repository (Forgejo for a nice web UI, cgit for a classic UI), DNS resolver.

  • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Personally:

    Nextcloud (file backup and so much more, I use it to backup files from my computer. Might explore some of the other features soon)

    Immich (image backup, I use it to back up photos from my camera + phone)

    Radicale (CalDAV + CardDAV for calendar and contacts sync)

    Forgejo (GitHub alternative, and the backend of Codeberg! I use this as a local backup to my git repos in addition with cloud backup with Codeberg. They work nice together, when you set two remotes per git repo)

    Vikunja (to-do list syncing, don’t use this anymore as I mostly use Joplin for this now)

    Joplin (Markdown editor, supports cloud sync with nextcloud, I use this for both notes and to-dos!)

    I used to run ConvertX (to convert any file type, whether it’s document, image, video, etc. Think a self-hosted CloudConvert), but I somehow messed up the user permissions and couldn’t log in (100% user error on my part), so I didn’t bother.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Another thing, “Navidrome” is a self-hosted spotify alternative (I don’t use it, I just have the MP3s and OGGs stored locally for offline playback!)

      Jellyfin is a self-hosted netflix alternative. Where you get the media is up to you…

      • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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        1 month ago

        I set up Radicale first, and never bothered to switch. Also, something about putting all your eggs in one basket.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Home Assistant seems like a really good option if you want smart home stuff, but I personally have a “dumb” home and not planning on getting wifi light bulbs any time soon.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      1 month ago

      I run all of this on my old laptop with Debian installed, and it works quite well!

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Off the top of my head:

    • Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
    • Immich (Google Photos replacement)
    • Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
    • LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
    • Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
    • Jellyfin (Primary media server)
    • Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
    • Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
    • Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
    • Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

    There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.

    • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
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      1 month ago

      I much prefer navidrome for music over jellyfin. Better presentation and usage, tracks meaningful data and displays it by default, and won’t delete your music library data if a folder gets moved. In other words jellyfin just gets rid of that data but navidrome will track missing songs and make you explicitly confirm removing them from the database.

      • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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        1 month ago

        I use FinAmp client with Jellyfin for music.

        I agree the Jellyfin interface is not well optimized for music, but FinAmp negates most of that and my phone is how I mostly listen to music anyway.

        I like Navidrone, but it’s a duplicate service that doesn’t really have a big value add over Jellyfin beyond the ability to share tracks with friends. A major feature upgrade, but not something I use terribly often.

        • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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          1 month ago

          FWIW, Plappa works really well on iOS. It’s not the official ABS app, but it was obviously designed around ABS. It has all of the features as the official app, without the whole “try every month to get into the TestFlight beta, because TestFlight hard caps the user count” BS.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
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    1 month ago

    I don’t see any mention of games so far.

    A minecraft server is always a good time with friends, and there are hundreds of other game servers you can self host.

  • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it’s a hackjob of a self-host solution and I’m ashamed of how it works.

    To address your examples directly:

    Media server: Jellyfin, along with an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.

    Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!

    Recipe management: Mealie is the best I’ve used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.

    Other things I have going:

    Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

    MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don’t have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it’ll give you the video. Here’s all the websites it supports.

    • JeanValjean@piefed.socialEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Frigate is the next big rock on my migration to lower power hardware. How are you running it? I’m trying to move to incus but I tested it on Docker. I need to get off my my W10 blueiris install.

    • ohlaph@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Is there documentation and stuff for an Android app to be built? I might be interested in building one.

    • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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      1 month ago

      My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

      Home Assistant can do notifications for Frigate that are very similar to Ring’s notifications.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      1 month ago

      IDK how Frigate handles alerts, but Blue Iris will write an alert to MQTT topic if it matches object recog, and I have an app MQTT Alert that watches that and goes nuts if it comes up. The BI android app is underwhelming in its alerts.

      I’d have to figure Frigate has some sort of MQTT capability. I tried using Frigate but it was pretty basic for my needs, so I moved on.

  • eletes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    1 month ago

    If you have a Nvidia graphics card 1070 and above, then openwebui. You can selfhost your own LLM. AMD is probably supported but haven’t checked.

  • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
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    1 month ago
    • media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
    • photos: immich
    • game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you’re into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn’t open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you’ll have on any platform.
    • recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
    • if you’re a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management
    • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.

      • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
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        1 month ago

        Nice! I haven’t dug into the API yet. The big thing for me was actually pretty small feature but tandoor let’s me scale recipes up and down on the fly with just a click of a button. I couldn’t find that in Mealie. We do a lot of home cooking for guests and large parties so being able to quickly see the portions and scale a recipe up/down saves a lot of mental math or errors.

        Edit: though looking at mealie demo again i see some recipes let you adjust the serving. But others do not