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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.
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.
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.
XMPP is nice but even with all of the quality of life extensions it definitely feels clunky. I tried switching to it recently from matrix and while matrix leaves a lot to be desired I found it was more useful in its current form than XMPP.
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.
Same!! I don't trust other sites to preserve my photography indefinitely, and definitely not in the quality I want, so I built this from scratch https://p.drkt.eu/ and it's just sitting on a box in my living room. Feels nice to watch the traffic tick by in the logs :)
This is your photography? Man that's good stuff. I like this one a lot. It appeals to me.. I also see you too like exploring abandoned structures.
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.
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.
Lifetime plex holder here, haven't installed plex since the third time my server shit the bed and it couldn't recover. Jellyfin has never had an issue with hardware failures. It also doesn't try to advertise random shit to me that I'm not interested in, so there's that too.
Eh, I think it depends.
In terms of display and content management, even how the client apps work, I'd say Jellyfin is far, far ahead.
Plex's only advantage (to me) would be remote access, and even then I'd say its just how accounts are handled. Which is only good when Plex auth is working properly, and an absolutely awful experience when its not.
I like having SSO in front of JF, I think its a much better experience. Now I just need to figure out how to get my kids to use SSO without a device... Which I'm leaning toward an NFC reader and a tag for each of them, maybe in a toy or something they can tap to a reader. TBD.
Jellyfin struggles with remote viewing. I'm not telling my fam to install tailscale on all their devices and to switch it on when wanting to watch a show.
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.
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!
I didn't expect to even need a NAS, but I can no longer live without two now. Having all my data in one place, automated backups on my secondary NAS. I found a cloud storage provider I like. Just the whole stack is wonderful and I'm never going back.
I was going to come in and say pihole, hands down as it got me into home labbing. But then I got reading some of the responses and my thoughts changed to Home Assistant because I can automate so much. An app that I had purchased to help me stay on top of my medications decided to go subscription so I was able to use HA to set up reminders to take my drugs go off on my watch which I would turn into reminders to do so much more. Than I thought Docker, because it is so much easier to install things with docker. Than I thought OpenWRT because I now have a real firewall that I can do so much more with than my ISPs dinky little thing. I was almost ready to reply when I read your question over again and I saw you mention the *arr stack and Jellyfin, which got me thinking how much I love that. Which reminded me of someone saying immich. I have to go for some blood letting today so I keep my blood req in paperless. I self host nextcloud and that is one thing I am looking at finding alternatives to but all that being said picking one is like picking a favourite family member, sure some you may like more than others but you are never going to tell which one.
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.
sftp, few of my friends have access to a shared directory where we upload random stuff
Man I miss the days of my friend group FTP server. I might have to look into this, but getting anyone to participate is going to be the real trick
My list, starting with most important tools:
baïkal
immich
paperless ngx
copyparty
vaultwarden
netbox
searxng
navidrome+feishin
jellyfin
forgejo
grafana
reitti
cryptpad
bentopdf
grist
rustdesk
PieFed and Navidrome
Fediversing with the whole world from my own server while listening to music that no "rights holder" can revoke the license to. It's a liberating feeling.
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 |
| MQTT | Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking |
| 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]
My favorite thing to self host is my RSS feed reader. I'm a huge fan of feedbin but I wanted to self host. I tried the usual self hosted RSS feed readers but I just prefer the way feedbin is laid out and how it works. So, I used Claude to create a self hosted clone of feedbin but with my personal modification to fit my workflow.
Hey could you just zip up your arr stack and send it to me? I don't know if it's just me or if it's just understood that it doesn't work the way it's advertised, but I cannot for the life of me get any one part if it to run 100% right.
TRaSH guides do a very good job explaining how to set up the file structure and configure each app. YAMS (yet another media server) is a script that automates the arr install. Looking at their docker compose file and guide could also help.
Don't know if I can pick a favorite but I'm often the most happy when I'm actively using Homebox and LubeLogger. I track my tools with the former and track service records, parts inventory, mileage and such with the latter. If I'm using those services extensively it's because I'm wrenching on something and adding more RockAuto magnets to my collection. Even when the circumstances suck, I genuinely enjoy an opportunity to take things apart, tinker and repair them.
No longer directly related to self hosting
I like busting out the jack and stands, reefing on a breaker bar, field repairs that succeed in getting out of a bind without waiting 2 hours for a tow bill in the hundreds of dollars, then making it home safely and doing it the right way, meticulously cleaning gasket surfaces...
It's zen for me and I don't know why. The same reason I enjoy stripping down a firearm and cleaning it more than the day at the range leading up to that point. Or why I'll go through the trouble of disassembling a $30 tower fan to extract every bit of dust and pet hair that has found it's way trapped inside. I couldn't pay someone else to do that for less than the damn thing costs... I just know that I can do it and feel compelled to. I might be an overgrown gnome.
I've got the family's vehicles in LubeLogger, having become the mechanic for anything short of transmission problems or requiring welding or a machine shop. The riding mower is in there too just because. It's never often enough and I'm tempted to find a bike or an old beater I can tune up just to have a project that doesn't have me sitting at the keyboard.