What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.

Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.

Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    • For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.

    • LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    I don’t see any mention of games so far.

    A minecraft server is always a good time with friends, and there are hundreds of other game servers you can self host.

  • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    34·
    6 days ago

    Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it’s a hackjob of a self-host solution and I’m ashamed of how it works.

    To address your examples directly:

    Media server: Jellyfin, along with an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.

    Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!

    Recipe management: Mealie is the best I’ve used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.

    Other things I have going:

    Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

    MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don’t have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it’ll give you the video. Here’s all the websites it supports.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      IDK how Frigate handles alerts, but Blue Iris will write an alert to MQTT topic if it matches object recog, and I have an app MQTT Alert that watches that and goes nuts if it comes up. The BI android app is underwhelming in its alerts.

      I’d have to figure Frigate has some sort of MQTT capability. I tried using Frigate but it was pretty basic for my needs, so I moved on.

    • ohlaph@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Is there documentation and stuff for an Android app to be built? I might be interested in building one.

  • Jade@programming.devEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    Here are some of the things I self host that I haven’t seen mentioned:

    • Continuwuity is a chat server that talks Matrix, so you can join the chat rooms of a lot of open source projects or make end to end encrypted private chats
    • Forgejo is a self-hosted code forge (github alternative) - very useful
    • FreshRSS is a good one if you like to follow blogs, newsletters or pretty much anything ‘news’
    • Grafana plus VictoriaMetrics and/or Quickwit is very useful for keeping track of the health of all your services
    • Homepage is a… homepage for all your services
    • Stalwart gives you a mail server. Set it up for any other projects that need to send mail, or as a backup for your emails, contacts or calendars - it’s the easiest way to set that up self hosted. Making it suitable as your main email may need more effort (delivery).
    • Related to Continuwuity / matrix, you can set up the Mautrix collection of bridges, which let you bridge Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, telegram, and more into your matrix account or chats seamlessly.
    • LMS (lightweight Media Server, not to be confused with Logitech Media Server) is an alternative to Navidrome that I find works better with my library tagging and ListenBrainz
    • Speakr - audio transcription with diarisation. Very useful if you like to record meetings.
  • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

    FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

    Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

  • WingedObsidian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    Headscale with headplane UI for access across servers

    Openwebui for LLM stuff with tika for doc processing

    Nextcloud for data and such

    Immich(migrating away from photoprism) for better photo management and phone upload

    Caddy for reverse proxy

    Not used as much: Monica for contact management Mealie for its ease of importing recipes

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago

    Jellyfin and Immich, first and foremost. From there, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, RustDesk, Docmost, and Nephele.

    (Full disclosure: Nephele is my own service. I find it quite useful.)

  • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago
    • media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
    • photos: immich
    • game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you’re into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn’t open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you’ll have on any platform.
    • recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
    • if you’re a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management
    • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.

      • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Nice! I haven’t dug into the API yet. The big thing for me was actually pretty small feature but tandoor let’s me scale recipes up and down on the fly with just a click of a button. I couldn’t find that in Mealie. We do a lot of home cooking for guests and large parties so being able to quickly see the portions and scale a recipe up/down saves a lot of mental math or errors.

        Edit: though looking at mealie demo again i see some recipes let you adjust the serving. But others do not.

        Edit 2: seems to be related when ingredients aren’t parsed

  • ArchEngel@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    I just found and set up Gameyfin (a play on Jellyfin). Still in the testing it out phase, but I love the idea of a collection of my friends and my DRM free games that we can all share with less reliance on big companies.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    Weather station, terrestrial/satellite TV DVR (TVHeadend), Git repository (Forgejo for a nice web UI, cgit for a classic UI), DNS resolver.

  • 2910000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    Your own wiki, and your own social media-type service

    I post miscellaneous notes to my social media-type service, and save lists and more organised information (including recipes) to my wiki.

    • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      I haven’t gotten to hosting my own wiki, but i do host an internal-only personal knowledge static site built with hugo. I have it set to build the site on my server which then serves it. Very useful to have something like that or a wiki.

      • 2910000@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        I used to do it that way too, but my wife is not technically inclined, so we settled on something with a web UI for editing.
        There are a few areas where the wiki is marginally better for me, the main one being the ability to do quick edits from a smartphone.
        I do really like the simple approach with a static site builder though

        • starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Out of curiosity what wiki are you hosting? I have a community that we were thinking about moving our docs to a wiki to be more accessible to non tech savvy people wanting to contribute

  • chillpanzee@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.

    Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.