Selfhosted

For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi

syncthing works on every device and substitutes for cloud storage services. pictures taken with a phone end up quickly in the shared folder on my desktop. etc.

Vaultwarden!!! There's lots of nice things that may or may not be good for you depending on your needs. But vaultwarden is straight up essential.

Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.

Home Assistant.

Let me throw in Paperless NGX, https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Anyone have a solid how-to for the layman to host their own lemmy instance? I heard it improves browsing a lot.

Trillium notes and Bitwarden.

The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things

Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.

Calibre docker stack; Calibre Guacamole instance, CalibreWeb, Openbooks set to save to the Calibre autoimport folder, and FBreader hooked to the OPDS endpoint for calibre. Its like having an Amazon Books ecosystem of my own.

PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).

https://www.photoprism.app/

I'm hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server

For me, it was a wiki/knowledge base - I've had dozens over the years as I've tried to find the 'right' one, but I'm currently a fan of @bookstack@fosstodon.org. My brain's not always the most reliable, and so my wiki becomes my 'external brain'. A lot of people are using things like Obsidian/Notion/etc in the same way.

ActualBudget. If you don't already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/

TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it's available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.

Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.