this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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Selfhosted

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I'm not affiliated with this in any way but saw it posted at the other place & thought fellow Lemmyzens might like to take a look.

I always find it quite hard to answer "favorite" apps as some infrastructure critical self hosted apps aren't as sexy as others which sit front & centre so I feel they often don't seem to get as much credit or attention (such as NGinX/DuckDNS compared to Immich/Jellyfin etc)

Hi everyone,

Like in previous years, I'm running a survey about self-hosting. The focus is on your favorite self-hosted apps, but there are plenty of other (optional) questions too. The top five app lists are free response fields, you don't have to select the suggestions.

Link to take the survey:

https://survey.deployn.de/s/self-host-2026

Last year's results

More info:

  • The survey is anonymous. Like last year, results will be published in aggregated form. I'm currently planning to publish them in December.

  • It takes about 10-25 minutes.

  • Some of you asked for more questions in the comments. I added a lot at first, then realized it took 45 minutes to fill out properly. So I threw some out again, but there are still quite a few. The survey now has a core section that mainly covers the MVPs (your 5 favorite apps), and you can switch on other modules if you want. Almost every question is optional and can be skipped. If you answer everything at a reasonable pace, it takes around 20 minutes.

  • The proprietary survey tool caused new problems every year, so last year I switched to HeyForm while the survey was already running. That wasn't ideal for my purposes either, so this year the survey runs on a new app. It should also make entering your apps faster.

  • It's still easier to fill out on a desktop computer.

Thank you in advance for participating.

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[โ€“] vilisseranen@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 1โ€“4 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
  • My MVPs: Immich, Nextcloud, dawarich, Home Assistant, PocketID
[โ€“] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 2 days ago

Getting labelled "AI pioneer" would feel like being called a slur

[โ€“] mik3dd0@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 1 device ยท 1โ€“4 TB
  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings
  • My MVPs: Immich, Searxng, Vaultwarden, Radicale, Rclone

Copyparty is not that known I guess.

[โ€“] habitualTartare@lemmy.world 44 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Top Motivation: Cost

The several hundred dollars a year and hours spend is definitely worth saving that $14-30/month in subscriptions right? right?

[โ€“] imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 3 days ago

Initial cost may be high. But I have calculated that my system. Would cost me 9 euros a month at 12tb of cloud storage. Something that I can't achieve if I pay for cloud storage to a big man.

What brings me from clouds back to earth is current hard drives prices. Fuck AI.

[โ€“] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

My wife spent about $130 for a year subscription to a service that she figured would always have her favorite show on it, because they own that show. Then like 10 seasons of it left for an exclusivity deal on another service. This was a contributing factor to pushing me into self hosting. Some of it is saving money, but some of it is also making sure you actually got what you paid for.

[โ€“] esc@piefed.social 9 points 3 days ago

Right, $14-30/m actually adds up to hundreds and is less reliable.

I know, I know super duper clouds, six nines of availability for cloud services etc., yet github (for example) fails more often then my media/git/file/print server on 10 y.o. laptop with tens of terabytes of media and data, that is less maintened and exists in a far worse conditions (comparison is incorrect but the fact stays).

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[โ€“] Joelk111@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Data Hoarder ๐Ÿ’พ

  • Fleet: 6โ€“10 devices ยท More than 50 TB
  • Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
  • My MVPs: Immich, PeerTube, Ghost, Actual Budget, Home Assistant

I create videos for YouTube/PeerTube and backup all of the raw footage. The actual storage count is currently 130TB in my main NAS with about 250TB for an offsite cold storage backup (as most of my data doesn't change much) and on-site live-ish backup. I also have the benefit of being able to get reputable used commercial grade HDDs from work for $10/TB, even right now, it makes it way too easy. Shameless plug of my PeerTube instance: https://joeltube.com/ or @JoelKalich on YouTube.

[โ€“] Clutter@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Data Hoarder ๐Ÿ’พ

  • Fleet: More than 10 devices ยท More than 50 TB

  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting

  • My MVPs: Pangolin, Nextcloud, kubernetes, freshrss, Jellyfin

[โ€“] jdr@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 days ago

Reeks of Claude

[โ€“] praxispotato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago (8 children)

AI Pioneer ๐Ÿค–

  • Fleet: 4โ€“5 devices ยท 21โ€“50 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
  • My MVPs: Gitea, Grafana, InfluxDB, LibreChat, Ollama
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[โ€“] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 19 points 3 days ago (7 children)

This survey definitely looks vibe-coded as heck lol but I hope the results will be good.

My results :)

Data Hoarder ๐Ÿ’พ

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท More than 50 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control
  • My MVPs: Immich, Baikal, Forgejo, qBitTorrent, Home Assistant

God knows I wasn't going to put cost as a motivation... I am actively losing money running double the storage I am using and 100+ GB of RAM on a Xeon chip, but having the headroom is certainly nice and has allowed me to expand as much as I want. Getting a good deal a couple of years back before the price explosion was a huge stroke of luck. If this server ever failed I could figure out a smaller operation with more confidence.

[โ€“] Jolteon@lemmy.zip 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Cost was one of my motivations, but it wasn't cost to me. Most of the people using my server definitely can't afford to subscribe to all those streaming services.

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[โ€“] gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Future Self-Hoster ๐ŸŒฑ

  • Next up: Jellyfin, Immich
[โ€“] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 4โ€“5 devices ยท 11โ€“20 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Radicale, Baikal, OPNSense, Home Assistant, AdGuard Home

A cynic might think this is all a data gathering exercise...and wonder why [AIP] isn't needed for a pretty clearly vibe-coded site? ๐Ÿซฅ

Nah, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
  • My MVPs: Immich, Home Assistant, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden, Navidrome
[โ€“] pandakhan@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

Fleet Commander ๐Ÿš€

  • Fleet: More than 10 devices ยท 21โ€“50 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Plex, swag, pihole, Navidrome

I realized that I actually have just over 50TB now after replacing a failed hard drive. I've been using retired enterprise hardware and slowly replacing it all with stuff that is MUCH lower power consumption and I recently got a DGX Spark so I could work on some self-hosted ML work for physics modeling and helping me fix all the code I manage to break. (read: catch typos and formatting)

[โ€“] Strider@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

I wanted to do the survey, but at some point the ui is barely understandable (#10 or so) and I gave up shortly after. And that's from a nerd.

[โ€“] outerspace@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

Homelab Veteran โšก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 1โ€“4 TB
  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Sonarr, Portainer, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden
[โ€“] ISolox@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 4โ€“5 devices ยท 11โ€“20 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Emby, AdGuard Home
[โ€“] cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Cost savings, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Syncthing, PhotoPrism, Home Assistant, Emby, Tailscale
[โ€“] BlueLagoon@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Homelab Veteran โšก

  • Fleet: 4โ€“5 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Learning & experimenting, Cost savings
  • My MVPs: Audiobookshelf, AdGuard Home, Traefik, AMP, BookBridge
[โ€“] giant_smeeg@feddit.uk 14 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Eternal Tinkerer ๐Ÿ”ง

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 21โ€“50 TB
  • Motivation: Cost savings, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership
  • My MVPs: FreshRSS, Home Assistant, Radarr, Sonarr, Nginx Proxy Manager
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Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 21โ€“50 TB
  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Jellyfin, Navidrome, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Teamspeak
[โ€“] SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Customization & full control
  • My MVPs: Jellyfin, Sonarr, Pi-hole, Navidrome, Home Assistant

This survey is going to become our version of Spotify Wrapped isn't it?

[โ€“] drive_desaster@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Pi-hole, Immich, Ollama, LubeLogger
[โ€“] bitwyze@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 2โ€“3 devices ยท 5โ€“10 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Fun / the hobby itself
  • My MVPs: Home Assistant, Pi-hole, WireGuard, tandoor
[โ€“] terraquad@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago

Self-Hoster ๐Ÿก

  • Fleet: 1 device ยท 1โ€“4 TB
  • Motivation: Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings
  • My MVPs: AdGuard Home, Immich, Continuwuity
[โ€“] NullCypher@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Data Hoarder ๐Ÿ’พ

  • Fleet: More than 10 devices ยท More than 50 TB
  • Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
  • My MVPs: Immich, Plex, opnsense, Nginx Proxy Manager, Gitea
[โ€“] Branny@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

AI Pioneer ๐Ÿค–

  • Fleet: 1 device ยท 21โ€“50 TB
  • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
  • My MVPs: Jellyfin, Navidrome
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