this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
43 points (93.9% liked)

Selfhosted

61808 readers
640 users here now

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:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. 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.

  8. 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!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
ayyy@sh.itjust.works
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world
43
Why homelab? (aussie.zone)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I was reading a homelab discussion about NUTs (Network UPS Tools) that left me scratching my head and wondering "...why? Is complexity for complexities sake part of homelabs? Isn't this a huge overkill for one machine? Just...use a UPS? "

Then I got to thinking more broadly about homelabbing and I started to wonder if there weren't maybe (at least) two different schools of thought.

Using home media as example -

  • Store the original.
  • Detect the client.
  • Transcode when required.
  • Monitor the GPU.
  • Add reverse proxy et al
  • Track bandwidth.
  • Add user accounts
  • Add failover.
  • Graph the result.
  • Dashboard.

Vs

  • Store a common compatible file for your devices.
  • Play it directly.

Which school of thought are you and why?

PS: not throwing shade. I get it; for some people, complexity, learning infrastructure, practicing skills for work etc is part of the why. For me, complexity as recreation is suspiciously like work after work.

Perhaps there's an odd Venn diagram between homelabbing, interest in ownership / useful capability and infrastructure that could make for a fun discussion. For you, is homelabbing a means to an end or is it an end in itself?

EDIT: Feel free to consider "home-lab" and "self hosted" as synonyms for the purpose of this discussion (although I am aware they are somewhat different in scope).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I'm the former, but most of that I'm not doing by hand. jellyfin transcodes when it wants, I'm not dealing with that. resources are monitored, a simple setup, so that if something happens I can look back why it happened. I also want alerts if something is predictably going to break down soon. with the latter school of thought, you wouldn't know if a disk was throwing smart errors for half a year before completely breaking down. but I don't have failover, I don't have the hardware and don't want the power bill for that. but I have reverse proxy because then every web thing is configured the same predictable way, plus I trust it more to handle the standards well. so most things I do, I do it because I think it to be valuable to me, not just for the sake of doing it.

homelabbing is the means to an end to me.