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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I'm a mechanic.
This is both my reason and explanation lol.
I do my own work has been said to be taken a bit too literally in my case. I got ripped off by Geek Squad when I was 18 and said "wow, it's just like getting ripped off at a shitty mechanic shop" and ever since then it's been all hands-on.
career
I sat on that fence but being a mechanic gives me guaranteed work and I basically work-out every day. It's hard, but not brutal and the pay is decent. Surrounded by maga tho.
I’m a web developer and whenever I pay my (awesome) mechanic I always sometimes wonder what it’s like on the “other side.”My dad was a mechanic when I was a child and I always regret never picking up those skills.
A lot of times when they run me through their problem-solving I’m like “damn, that’s just like reproducing a bug to find its root cause.”
I always regret never picking up those skills.
Never too late
I'm also a mechanic, I self host for basically the same reasons and I just don't like the idea of big tech spying on me . Definitely a lot of MAGA, it's fucking annoying hahaha.
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
I'm a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
as a student, this is much more interesting than studying
As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.
I once wired my whole ass house for ethernet. (Before realizing I was colorblind nonetheless.) Instead of studying.
Never underestimate how you can use study procrastination as a push force for other shit. (Unless you're a dipshit like me and do it with an imminent exam)
Piracy, basically.
Self-hosting wasn't my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there's a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it's text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it's not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it's only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.
I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica's black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that's like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you're downloading our music on Napster, then we don't want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find "alternative methods" for every piece of digital media I could, if that's how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.
I still download and share all of Metallica's discography out of spite, but haven't listened to them since.
I love your origin story so much
The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.
Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.
I've been a media hoarder for decades, my partner is an avid dvd collector. I used to have lofty goals with friends about setting up our own server and media centers so we didn't have to afford the world we live in. The friends fell off along the way, but I finally managed to make the dream happen. It's bittersweet that I don't really have anyone to celebrate it with.
Sorry to hear. On the upside, no one will be upset when the server goes down.
I'm an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any 'junk' they wanted to get rid of. I'd load up my wagon and back to the house I'd go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.
I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests....until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.
My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I've had just about one of each since then.
Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real 'self hosting' gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that's about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.
From there, I've been selfhosting something or another but it didn't start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.
I fucking hate tech companies
Former English teacher here. My self-hosting origin is that I had 20 years or so of teaching materials I'd collected in OneNote over that time and simply wanted to have offline copies so that I could feel that if ever something went wrong with Microsoft like getting permanently locked out of my account, then I had a means of restoring everything. Microsoft makes it practically impossible to export to a working backup.
After spending a LONG time trying everything to get back ownership of my materials, I understood the need to move my digital stuff away from big tech. I bought a Synology NAS, learned how to use Docker and then took more steps. About the same time I started using Fediverse apps and learned a great deal from the discussions and links there. My greatest "learn" has been keeping notes in plaintext files (and not getting seduced by nice shiny new apps that are actually horrors that want lure you into a future subscription).
I use Obsidian as a OneNote replacement because it's built around markdown, which is just a a text file that includes structure and formatting.
I don't use their subscription syncing service, just sync files to my own phone and server. Obsidian is great for organizing, but I can still read all the files as text.
The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I'm working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn't want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
All of it comes gradually, I'm tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Lemmy has been a big part of it.
I've never been fond of paying big tech to spy on me. It has been getting gradually more expensive and more intrusive for years. Around the time I reached a breaking point, folks here helped me realize that digital sovereignty is possible.
One day I was just like, "Why does Google need to know when my lightswich is on?" And that was the start of it.
-Cable is insanity. It's companies are corrupt and awful.
-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?
-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.
The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.
I'm an accountant and tax professional but have always been into computers. I had a social media account breached although it was no issue as hadn't used it did years. I used a terrible password as thought it did not matter but made me realise I needed to be better generally so started using a password manager.
Then Netflix stopped account sharing. I had just got a 4k TV and only their top level with 4 screens supported it so was pissed off. The fragmentation across services had started so was getting annoyed anyway. This led me to the arr's.
I decided I could no longer trust Microsoft and hated their pricing structure so was interested in Nextcloud. By then I found the self hosted community (on reddit), bought a desktop PC and after getting the hang of it plus many mistakes I loved my services so will never look back.
Joined the migration to Lemmy. Am based in the UK and joined the anti-US feelings so am setting up more storage, better redundancy and more services for my family. A few family members are interested in helping so can share backups.
This feels like the road I took. Subscription services are a scam, and I can't trust sharing personal data on somebody else's hardware. Eventually I'd like to host instances for federated services I already use.
The military. Being on a ship with no wifi for months on end sort of makes you invest in entertainment that can go off grid. It started with a 3TB hard drive and what amounts to a NAS for hooking up to a computer screen or TV. I then moved to using Plex for streaming and the interface. Eventually I moved to Jellyfin.
At this point I just have a server in my living room with 10TB's worth of drives and the ability to share just about anything locally or wirelessly when I'm outside my house.
My job is technical but not... IT, cyber security, or development related. I've always been interested in computers though and have built several at this point.
I'm a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I've always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.
And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz
Well… I bought a Philips hue starter set. And I had heard of mqtt, zigbee and pihole. And I had a spare raspberry pi.
Now that got out of hand and I am looking at a proxmox cluster….
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.
I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn't want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don't have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora's box was open.
Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it's been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
I didn't want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc... And that's also how I ended up with a career in IT.
I wanted more Dropbox space. Self hosted Nextcloud when Docker became a thing.
Ended up getting a job in tech as I got better with containerization and better at programming from scripting and reading Data Structures books
I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one
My first interest was in running Unix for uucp Usenet, early 1980s. Never happened since I was poor, so it took DSL availability some 20+ years ago to run a Debian server at home. Around 1997 I ran my own Linux box on a university network, which ran a web server.
I'm a teacher too. Started feeling burnt out a few years ago and considered a career change to tech. Didn't make the jump but did gain a new hobby and a love for privacy, owning my own things, and happy blinking lights in a rack. Still not as jazzed about teaching as I used to be, but making time to work on projects that have clear, achievable goals has been good for me.
I've always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It's so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.
I'm an industrial engineer who was hanging out on lemmy and my IT guy was talking about his piracy server, and well I thought that a legitimately aquired media server might be nice, and that home assistant thing sounded cool so he gave me the form to get two used desktops for free from the company. And well now I'm still fucking around with them every once in a while in anticipation for when my space will warrant actually using them full time.
It also helps that my local bdsm community had had self hosters who talked about it for years.
I lack formal education in the tech field, but I honestly wish I didn't waste my 20's on drugs (it was fun though, honestly) and an attempt at a rap career, instead of getting my hands dirty in the field, so to speak. I got into computers in the early 2000's, discovered linux in 2006, and since then I've been that friend who's into computers and stuff.
I kind of forget what exactly got me into self-hosting . . . but youtube probably had something to do with it, with many youtubers like Raid Owl, Level1Techs, and even LTT talking about things like Jellyfin and TrueNAS, it got me curious as to why I never got into it sooner.
R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.
I'm not in a tech field now, but I used to be. I jumped ship when everything started moving to 'cloud based' because I don't trust anything I can't kick when it breaks.
As a kid, dad set me up on one of his spare dos/win3.1 PCs when he was working. The passion and learning never stopped from that point. Just not something I want to make a career of.