Everything. Self host everything, even your pets.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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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.
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How do I selfhost my bedbugs?
I think you need a Windows server for that.
I do hate myself, but not that much
Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.
FreshRSS for RSS reading
Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)
HomeAssistant
Calibre-web for ebooks
PiHole
Joplin for self hosted notes
Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately
I remember reading a thread like this a while back and saw Home Assistant. I thought I don't need that.
It's probably the most used self hosted app we have.
I wish you didn't have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of "programmer-knows-better" software ever engineered.
Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.
You can try to use Komga instead, but it's mostly meant for comic books and it's kinda heavy, honestly.
It is a little convoluted how it's set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I've quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
Calibre is so old that it's use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It's not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.
Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It's not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.
There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, Calibre already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that's an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they're not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.
Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.
Really, it's so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There's constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.
Hah. You get the "FOSS gets to be crap because you can't do it yourself" cop out often, but rarely when you haven't actually complained about it.
I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don't get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don't even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It's like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.
Unless you're Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don't see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I've seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I'm not sure he'd take it as an insult and I don't mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn't made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.
But since I'm at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it's FOSS. If you put it out there don't be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don't need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that's annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.
Yeah, I don't think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there's no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there's a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it's been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You're also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy's name "rough" is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.
Again, it's fine if you don't like it, don't understand it, and don't want to understand it. But that doesn't excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone's name is somehow appropriate, it's bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You're all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.
Have you tried out https://booklore.org/ ?
It seems different enough from calibre and kavita et al.
Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can't even remember.
In any case I'm part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I'm married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.
Export all fixes that... Doing that to my syncthing to sync my files to the ereader. Still looking for a way to get rid of calibre :(
Yeah, it's hard exit that directory structure once you have gone all in.
Check out Selfh.st
Very good resource. Well written. I know nothing about him but does seem to have a great rapport with Lemmy SH.
ETA: I'm reluctant, but keen to know so, is there some ancient lore that prevents me from asking 'Is there a reason why noted.lol doesn't live here too? I searched and I did find a handful of references, but nothing like selfh.st.
You’re referencing the deep lore.
Noted.lol was around awhile before selfh.st and was actually pretty beloved on the SelfHosted subreddit. Then the guys behind selfh.st showed up and some of the people who were contributing to noted.lol started giving them a hard time for “copying” them or some nonsense like that. Lots of drama. Now you never really hear about noted anymore.
Before you even start, consider adopting an 'infrastructure as code' approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.
Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you're feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you're setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you'll thank me.
Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.
That's a very good idea, will definitely do that.
Bentopdf if you deal with PDFs
Omni-tools if you need to convert between 2 formats or units
It-tools for the fun of it.
I currently have an assisted Snikket hostle which is an open wrixler.
- You want to go from the bottom of that list up. Do the boring before the fun or you'll have to redo the fun to make it work right with the boring.
- PiHole. (After backups, before media apps)
Second this.
And I'll add DietPi is great, easy to run wherever you want. I run it in its own VM on my ESXi box.
I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.
Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.
Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.
I'd say, though, that's a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I'd certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you're gonna be wrangling.
This was merged with jellyseer and is just called seer now. I believe it's 'safe' to switch to the develop branch they have available. I've had zero issues so far.
Hah. Good to know. I haven't refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn't considered it. I'll take a peek at the new one.
Personally, I am running Nextcloud (file backup mostly. There's a bunch of other options too if you don't want the "all-in-one"ness of Nextcloud, but I find that it has good integration with lots of apps), Immich (the best photo backup there is), Radicale (my first one, Nextcloud already has similar functionality I think. I use DAVx^5^ on my phone for this, Thunderbird for desktop), Vikunja (to-do list app, partly compatible with CalDAV. I pair this with the Android app Tasks[dot]org and it works quite well), and Forgejo (local git backup, I still use codeberg for cloud backup though). I can strongly recommend all of them, they all work fantastic! Tailscale is also neat to set up if you want to access your local network remotely.
One fun thing you can do is set up a little Minecraft server for you, any siblings/cousins/other family you have or your roommate if you have one of those. I host one using PaperMC, it's just a survival server for just me and my sibling, it's quite nice!
Other people have already mentioned Home Assistant, but I personally haven't used that. If you do have smart homey things though, it sounds really good!
I also have notes using Joplin, but I'm using Nextcloud to sync rather than Joplin Server!
Since you’re running Jellyfin already, you can put your music in there and use an app like https://discrete.app/ on iOS or something comparable on Android for a better UX
Finamp on Android.
I’m wondering if Android has something nicer looking. Plex has PlexAmp which looks great, Emby’s built in music player in their main app looks terrific, FinAmp is like aestheticslly like the stock standard JellyFin app which is awful.
Discrete in iOS at least is just an attempt at looking like a carbon copy of Apple Music. There must be some good looking g Jellyfin music player on Android.
- pihole: DNS ad-blocker abd also a DNS (and optionally DHCP) server for your home
- Wireguard: VPN very simple to setup, for remote access to your services from outside your home. What I do: wireguard is running (as a server) on a VPS, with all the security measures in place (ssh password login turn off, firewall bocks everything but wireguard and ssh connection changed to another port, failban) then my NAS at home connects to this VPS, as well as my phone, laptop, etc.
- Caddy: reverse proxy to address your service using your domain, it's easy to setup, actually it's the only reverse proxy I managed to setup successfully 😅. You can use the Nameservers from your domain provider to point to your NAS via the wireguard IP address for connection from the outside, and Pihole DNS to point to local IP address when at home.
Technitium dns (and dhcp) server instead of pihole maybe, with advanced blocking app.
I'm running:
- Easy wire guard - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
- Plex - plexamp is fabulous for music
- Portainer
- Immich
- Arrs - prowlarr - sonarr - radarr - lidarr
- Cloudflared - for tunneling via cloud flare
I have pihole on a pi for DNS.
Isn't wireguard already pretty easy???
Also unless it changed I thought Plexamp was only available to Plex Pass subscribers.
Plexamp - Nah they made it free for everyone a while back.. the sonic analysis aspect is gare kept behind the pass. Iirc But I'm a lifetime pass holder for like a bazillion years .. I think my annual average cost is like $4 at this point lol
Wg-easy - truth be told I just started it up this week. I formatted my phone and wanted to try something else for wire guard. But you are correct wire guard is pretty darn easy.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DHCP | Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| ESXi | VMWare virtual machine hypervisor |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| LTS | Long Term Support software version |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
[Thread #54 for this comm, first seen 2nd Feb 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Host Jellyfin
Some form of hosted musicstreaming integration with my local music
For the music, jellyfin can do this and it uses subsonic api which means you can connect to the music server with some mobile and desktop apps. Alternatively i like navidrome for more specialized music service that still uses subsonic api. Some people prefer not having a second service if jellyfin is good enough for their needs.
Automate Backups and push them on my server
For backups look into borg if your NAS doesn't have anything native.
make all of the above things available where ever I want using my own self hosted domain.
Look into doing let's encrypt DNS-01challenges via something like acme.sh if your domain registrar has an api. this will let you get your own certs for local use without exposing the subdomains on the domains dns. If you're going to make them public then that is less important but it's still a good way to automate renewals and deploying regardless.
run my own dns
Pihole unbound can offer a recursive dns server. Very easy set up.
In the long term I also want to be able to host my own webapps, since I will soon start to develop one for someone.
Now I want to know what suggestions do you have, for stuff thats really cool and that I can selfhost.
Outside of the obvious segmenting public zones and firewall, you could self host an SSO service. This would allow you to easily put forward auth on a dev build if you were needing to keep it selectively private until/if you made it public.
In general though, i just wait until i come across a problem or need and then i see if a service exists to solve that. Occasionally looking through the awesome selfhosted list or similar helps find blind spots i didn't know i had.
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