Just gonna say it.
Stash. Is a great FOSS media management platform for primarily adult content.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Several things. Mosquitto to control an ecosystem of LEGO models, some CALDAV syncer, and a mediawiki engine for D&D worldbuilding.
Immich
Jellyfin
HomeAssistant
Dawarich
HortusFox
In that order.
Things like the *arrs, traefik/authelia, etc. are just a necessity and not something that gives back like the 5 mentioned at first.
what do you mean by "gives back"? To whom? For example, why Jellyfin over any of the *arrs
I think what they mean is that things like Traefix, arr, et al are means to an end. The ideal situation is that you don't need to touch them after they're set up. Jellyfin, on the other hand, is something you actively sign into and use
Kind of.
To me they are more like accessories and not services I interact with (interact like homeassistant, immich, jellyfin).
Services like Traefik/Authelia are infrastructure. Needed but not required.
They are like a road. Nice to have and receive a smooth ride but driving on the bare ground is possible but uncomfortable ;)
If I had to only pick one that is by far Home Assistant.
100%. Home Assistant has proven to be incredibly useful in my house. My wife loves it for the laundry notifications, the fact that I essentially replaced Life360 with it (Traccar, really, but it ties into HA so nicely), and the automated lighting: our basement (the younger kids' play area), and themed lighting for the outdoor lights.
We've been fighting tangled toilet flapper chains over the last few years. The tangled chain keeps the flapper from closing, which causes the tank to continuously run into the bowl, which causes my water bill to skyrocket if gone unnoticed (we have 5 kids, 4 toilets, and the chains get tangled no matter what I do: new chain, longer chain, shorter chain, different type of chain/string/twine, etc... I blame the hard water). I finally got fed up, so I bought and installed a zigbee water level sensor for each toilet tank, then whipped up an automation which notifies us via Android's "alarm_stream" notification channel if a sensor has been dry for longer than a few minutes. That channel overrides DND, and I am going to add an entry to ping my HA Voice thing as well in case we don't have our phones on us.
You should really up your game and buy some ESPs and servo motors to jiggle the toilet handles when the toilets are running.
Selfhosting Lemmy has been surprisingly nice
Does it have any particular benefits over using a random public instance? All I've heard is mostly needing heaps of bandwidth and storage.
Since I already host a bunch of stuff, it hasn't been a big burden for me. I get to laugh any time one of the popular instances goes down or has some admin/mod controversy, but the tradeoff is I have to manually subscribe to everything since I don't have an "All".
I mostly did it because this is the only way to truly own your lemmy identity. I hope one day it will be possible to link accounts on different instances together so that migrating doesn't lose your history.
I love Immich. I've pulled in all my photos going back to high school in the early 2000s and it's so awesome having a timeline of them.
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Email's probably the most satisfying. I learnt a lot in setting up my own email server, and it's nice being in complete control (well, of my end of things at least, ofc not of the other person's end) of such an essential service.
Damn, never heard anyone enjoy hosting e-mail servers
that's crazy though
Tbh was quite painless for me! Had a few hiccups but it was educational to troubleshoot them, and once it's up and running, I haven't had to touch it for the most part. Had to update my Dovecot configs when they changed the config syntax but that's all I can think of. And will probably see about switching from spamassassin to rspamd because I swear spamassassin has so many false positives no matter how many false positives I feed to it to train it. But it's really not so bad, and I would recommend it as a decent learning opportunity for folks who like tinkering with computers.
OpenWRT, pihole, immich are among the most well-functioning powerful and clean pieces of software I have ever used. They just work.
Navidrome for me. I have a physical collection of around 2000 albums across CD, vinyl, and cassette, plus a lot of digitally only purchases over the years. Finally getting it all on my own server and being able to just tap a button to shuffle the entire collection is just about everything I ever wanted.
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My own art gallery. Started feeling the ick about posting on social media and just moved everything to my own hand-coded home page in Lustre. Feels nice to have a little space that's just mine.
It ain't much, but I'm also pretty proud of my Forgejo+actions setup. Pushing a commit and seeing my services update, knowing it's all happening on "my" (VPS, but still) infra gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling.
My own art gallery
What kind of art? Do you paint, create pottery, etc. My lady friend is a self taught painter, and does some mind blowing stuff. Hell, I can't even put paint on a wall or draw stick figures. LOL She tells me I am biased, but I respond that I know good art when I see it. I always wanted to get into pottery. That seems like it would be super cool.
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Plex. Right now we're on vacation and can chill out with our current shows before bedtime, watching on the TV of the relative hosting us. No fuss. Aside from Movies and TV Series it also holds my music collection, Plexamp is awesome.
I've not gotten very deep into selfhosting due to priorities and time but I look forward to trying Immich as well as Home Assistant in the future.
I run many of the usual suspects, but I would say Home Assistant is on the top of the list.
- Integrates with seemingly endless smart home devices
- Make automations that make your house seem like magic
- Make it look just how you want it to
- and best of all, it costs ~~numerous hours of tinkering~~ nothing!
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Self hosting our budget with Actual has been a game changer for my partner and I. No other budget app really worked for us but this was super easy and the PWAs really make a difference.
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PiHole on old laptops started the journey for me
Now I've got all sorts of things, most visible are Plex and Audiobookshelf. The most useful to me personally is Headscale for what at I assume are obvious reasons.
I'd like to use Matrix more but that requires some buy-in from friends.
I ostensibly use this as a means of continued education for myself, but really it's because I enjoy using/learning about open-source software and creating my own ecosystem outside of "big tech"
I've got it all set up in a way that really works for me, which is all that really matters in the end.
apart from the usual suspect like, Jellyfin+Plex (still have some straggler users that need to upgrade their players for JF to work properly), Immich, nextcloud etc, I really like running Birdnet-Go. I give it my CCTV camera feeds and it uses a NN to identify birds it hears.
I get statistics about species heard around the property, charts to correlate detections to seasons and weather, and some interesting info about rarer species that I didn’t know were in my area. Every morning I check it to see if there was anything new recorded.
it doesn’t really have a purpose, though the data can be submitted to larger databases, but it's just a nice thing to have.
bringing you joy is its purpose, and that is valid.
Game servers that my friends can enjoy
Which ones get he most play?
Whatever is the most popular at the time of the games release or update. Valheim/terraria/Minecraft/satisfactory/palworld to name a few.
I still love getting messages via xmpp from friends and family using my own snikket/ejabberd instances after years of use. Calls as well.
Video conferences via jitsi meet fill my heart with joy since the covid epidemic. These are also xmpp based. It's just a cool lightweight protocol.
You got your friends and family to switch to XMPP and Jitsi? impressive
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
[Thread #64 for this comm, first seen 27th Jul 2026, 12:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Definitely Plex, it's pretty much the entire reason I'm self hosting in the first place!
Haven't watched or listened to any mainstream media in another way for years and it also gets plenty of usage from other people.
I think jellyfin is better, isn't it?
Jellyfin is free and open-source, which is why it is very popular with the lemmy crowd. But unless you value those two aspects extremely high, it's not better.
Yeah anyone who bought a lifetime Plex pass back when it was very reasonably priced is left looking at the jellyfin/Plex debate a bit crosseyed.
If you don't have a lifetime pass, and need to cut costs, go jellyfin. Otherwise, I choose Plex.
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So hard to pick a favourite. I'm especially proud of having the mail server.
Mail gang in da house.
Everyone should hoat mail. These corps started there for a reason. Take it all back.
Mine is my Jellyfin.
With a good few plugins it's gotten to the point now that my Jellyfin is my
Movie Shows And music service
Its been really fun to hunt for blurays of my favorite shows and take the time to rip them and get all the extras labeled.
Same goes for looking at bandcamp and buying CDs again.
I still have some media I liberate.. I mean they won't make blurays of everything sadly.
This! I've been loving flipping through DVDs and blurays at Goodwill looking for gems to put in Jellyfin. I love that they will never go away, and I still feel a little giddy when I can watch something from the NAS in my office when I'm at someone else's house. Today, my daughter and my niece each watched different episodes of Octonauts at the same time on different devices, and both were a thousand miles from my server. ☺️ All from a raspberry pi!
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