Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).
what is your favorite app for android?
we like conversations, but our phones don't treat it like a regular calling app. navigation and music still play over the conversation phone call.
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I've been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.
First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you've not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don't want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.
I also recommend Pihole - it's an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It's really improved my experience on all my devices.
Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.
Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.
Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.
Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.
I selfhost Anysync for Anytype. In this way I can sync my notes with my family.
What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.
I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I've written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.
I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for 'read it later' type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.
I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.
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Vaultwarden
I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…
Haha, I don't trust my own server either, but I don't trust anyone elses even more.
hence keepass :D
might set up syncthing too so I can sync my passwords p2p...
Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.
I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.
Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It's the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.
If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That's what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.
Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.
ooh I might try that then!
I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?
Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.
For Immich, official docs were fantastic!
For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)
I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
There is a learning curve but it's not too steep and I've enjoyed it.
There a million ways, and you will probably find tons of tutorials each different - Docker, Docker Compose, native install, VMWare, Kubernetes, Portainer, etc. I recommend starting with a clean machine - preferably with an attached monitor - and installing your favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu is among the easiest), getting Docker and Docker Compose running, and familiarizing yourself with these technologies.
Then you can start with a simple app like Paperless (document digitization), Vikunja (TODOs), BookStack (wiki), or PrivateBin (pastebin), getting it running and persist state over a period of time, then setting up a reverse proxy so you don't have to use IPs all the time (with just editing your hosts file to point a URL to IP of your machine), and then it is a free world.
Of course, having the whole setup secure, independent, and easily manageable is partially eyperience and partially understanding your needs.
You will probably even find whole ready-to-deploy git repositories that are easily configurable, so you can go with that too.
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I host a number of alternate frontends. Alexandrite for Lemmy, Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube. And then I have the Privacy Redirect extension make any links to Reddit or Youtube go to my local.
Ah, that seems pretty cool :D
Is Invidious still working? After the latest round of API patches on Youtube's end, I didn't think it was.
No, it doesn't seem to be. That's ashame.
There are still active instances out there. They are a pita to maintain as you'll be playing catch me fuck me with Google ad nauseam. I gave up running my own instance and just rely on the public instances since they seem to be good at whack a mole a la Google.
Invidious
How do you keep Invidious running? I've tried all the alternatives like Piped, etc. I can't keep them running for more than a week before it gets banhammered by Google.
Well, its apparently borked and I didn't realize it. I've never gotten an IP ban but I also wasn't using it a ton - mostly just for when I'd search for instructions on something an a YT vid was my only option.
I mainly use Nebula for watching videos. And the handful of creators I follow who are strictly youtube, get slurped up by ytdlp via Pinchflat
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Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway
If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.
Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.
I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.
If you have a car Lubelogger is a solid maintenance tracker.