I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!

Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!

  • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org
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    1 year ago

    As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:

    Paperless_ngx

    ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts…). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to “scan” it, upload it, then bin the paper.

    An actual life change that i didn’t know i needed.

    • haulyard@lemmy.world
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      Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?

      edit: looks like scans are saved as pdf’s. Thanks for the insight!

    • constantokra@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I’ve tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven’t managed to get what’s better about it. I know i’m missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i’d be more likely to out in the work to transition.

      • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org
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        1 year ago

        well, there are a few things:

        1. using the app to take photos (in a scan sort of mode, where it trims it to be at right angles), really quick and easy, no matter where i am.
        2. remote access - i can view all of my documents where ever i am.
        3. easy & sophisticated search. I have my documents assigned to people (me, wife, child, etc). I also assigned them to things like payslips, tax, shares, legal documents, education docs, receipts, etc. it also helps to automatically tag them to some degree of accuracy
        4. Automatic dating, it is quite good at picking out the date of the document, as seperate to the upload date. and it is easily updatable if it is wrong
        5. OCR - the documents content is searchable!
        6. Ease of tax time. I have some financial year views that make it really easy for me to do my tax (Australia), and i dont need to go hunting for paper that has faded in the heat and is no longer legible.
        7. folders - the documents are placed in a folder structure of your choosing. if you change the details in the document meta-data, it will move it to the correct place.

        so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!

        • constantokra@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          That was a really clear explanation, thanks. Decent remote scanning would be nice. I guess I just have to wrap my head around tags for some of the niceties to make sense, though I guess i’d be no worse off if I just used folders if that’s an option as well.

          • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org
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            1 year ago

            you’re welcome.

            I tend to use document types more than tags now. note that there are a number of meta-data fields:

            • correspondent
            • docuemnt type
            • tag

            i started with tag, but now mostly use a combination of the doc date, type and correspondent. Then use the search bar for specific documents.

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?

      • AnAnxiousCorgi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless “inbox”.

      • hogofwar@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yep, supports upload folder, normal upload in the application and also automatically importing from email based on folder/label

    • sylverstream@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn’t have e.g. OCR features, it’s pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!

  • Acid@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

    I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

    So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

    Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool

    • HamSwagwich@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.

      I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.

      No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.

    • baked_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Probably an ignorant question but the content you use is pirated right? Should I wonder about legal issues since I would keep it at home and connected to Internet? Protected of course I just don’t see too deep into the issue

      • f1g4@feddit.it
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        If you don’t explicitly set a DNS to allow access from outside the local network, all your stuff is private and confined within your local network. As it is with all, let’s say, wifi stuff that goes on in your home.

        Edit. What @notorious said

  • sylverstream@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.

  • ryncewynd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Self hosting nothing changed my life.

    So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅

    • shinjiikarus@mylem.eu
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      1 year ago

      I always compare self hosting to PC gaming: it has some very specific benefits, but you don’t even comprehend, how many downsides you will encounter you cannot even start to anticipate. If one doesn’t like the pain a little bit theses hobbies aren’t any good and I totally understand everyone giving up on them.

      • itsmikeyd@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Self hosting is much closer to gaming on Linux than Windows imo, but it’s a great analogy nevertheless.

      • vaptor@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve been pc gaming for dozens of years and last few years I have near zero problems.

        Maybe a combination of popular and newish hardware combination and dozen years of technical experience.

        Linux gaming on the other hand… (except maybe deck)

        • shinjiikarus@mylem.eu
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          haha, I have the same experience tbh, but I still get the obvious “I don’t want to update my drivers or fiddle with settings and controls, I just want something that works”, responses. I don’t even recognize these topics as “pain” anymore, but this probably just shows how high my tolerance has become in the last decades.

    • eodur@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s disappointing that this is the highest voted comment on a thread in the selfhosted topic…

      • pachrist@lemmy.world
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        I don’t know. I think it speaks to something that we sometimes forget. Self hosting is great, but there’s a bit of time and commitment that’s needed for almost everything. Most people are used to single click, always works apps. Doing your own building, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and deployment can be a headache that’s too much for some people.

      • ryncewynd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s really the phrasing “average joe”. I would genuinely give the average Joe a strong recommendation to not self host.

        A beginner wanting to learn to be more techy and willing to put in hours for troubleshooting etc? Sure go ahead. But thats definitely not the average Joe.

        My biggest advice to a beginner would be to buy a spare budget router, plug it into your ISP router, plug your pc into the new router and do all your messing around in your own network.

        Break the internet because of bad configure? No stress, it’s only your little network, your flatmates/family aren’t yelling at you.

        Can’t figure out what you did wrong and want the internet back to search? Just plug your pc back to the untouched ISP router so you get internet again

    • zuccs@lemm.ee
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      Was it r/cordcutters? So good not self hosting even dumb things especially when friends and family use it. I’d rather just fork out for the bill myself.

    • Broken_Orange_Juice@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      As others have worded it, it’s a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it’s a fun hobby, and I’ve learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.

  • slackj_87@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren’t in the cloud.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don’t trust the cloud providers.

      • peregus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I second your opinion about not selfhosting Bitwarden. About email, have a look at Proton mail. All the emails are encrypted in the server and are decripted client side with your password only when you open them.

  • KNova@links.dartboard.social
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    1 year ago

    For me it’s 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I’m dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:

    • Maps
    • Calendar
    • Email
    • Markdown editor (I’m using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
    • I haven’t tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
    • a bunch of other stuff I’ve never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.
  • fedonr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.

    I’ll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich

    Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix

    Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you’ll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.

    • kenyard@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Plex is a far better and user friendly version than jellyfin or emby in my experience especially if you want to share to friends. Granted it’s not open source and has gone commercial route so there is the risk it will continue there. But for now I wouldn’t push to move. If jellyfin can get some more app support and continue to develop and be ready for when Plex messes up then it will take off.

      • fedonr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        True for users who are already setup with Plex, for them there is no reason to switch as of now, but for a person starting from scratch and setting up things for the first time, it makes a lot of sense to get Jellyfin instead of going Plex. As Plex is moving away from their core of making user’s media available for streaming, and rather focuses in pushing its own streaming content (I know we can toggle that behavior off but it is headache fot new comers, and it should be off by default and if a person likes they can turn on Plex’s streaming content, default should be the user’s content)

      • dustojnikhummer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        if you want to share to friend

        Not if they need their own Plex Pass for so many features. The only thing Jellyfin lacks is user self password resets and transcoded downloads. I don’t really see any other advantages in Plex

        • backpackn@lemmy.ml
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          Does jellyfin handle audiobooks? For some reason I found the service lacking a couple of years ago, but can’t remember why.

          So I got Plex pass and really enjoy it. The Prologue app gives you an audible-like interface for audiobooks that I love. Plexamp for music and Plex Dash to monitor the server. Audnexus matches audiobooks to Audible listings for the metadata. Plex movies and tv match to get metadata, trailers, behind the scenes, cast list, and rotten tomatoes reviews. If Plex ever gets too commercialized/restricted for some reason I’ll switch, but for now I couldn’t be happier.

          • dustojnikhummer@lemmy.world
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            As far as I know there is basic audiobook support. But I have no clue, because I don’t use it. If I used Audiobooks I wouldn’t be using Jellyfin for them anyway

        • MaggiWuerze@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Only if you want to access it remotely without VPN to your home network. Nothing in Plex forces you to use their servers and you could run it in a network without internet connection

      • fedonr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Yes its basically selfhosted Google Photos instance kinda thing. There is a great story the Dev shared once, he was paranoid about backing up things to Google or Apple cloud as they have history of sharing it with Feds. So Dev won’t like his family pictures on such platforms, so when him and his partner were to have a baby, he started working on immich, so by the time baby arrives he’ll have a safe platform to backup family pictures.

        • dirtbiker509@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Wow!! Immich looks great. I’ll be getting that going asap. I actually just started paying for Google drive just to have more space for photos and videos. I’ve always wanted to move over to using my server but I just couldn’t find a great Google photos alternative. This looks perfect.

          • fedonr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Glad to know, I was able to help ya avoid that cost. We should be thanking the Dev’s baby, as it helped us all to protect our privacy and our pockets 🤣.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Does duplicati have to do periodic full backups?

      I’ve used borgbackup / borgmatic. One full backup and only incrementals thereafter.

  • chrono@apollo.town
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    1 year ago

    FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don’t provide one

    • techgearwhips@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hey I got FreshRSS self hosted and everything is up and running smooth. Only thing is, for the websites without RSS… how did you get the RSS for those?

    • Drudge@lemmy.world
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      Quick question, don’t want to highjack the thread. This looks interesting, but I don’t understand why I couldn’t just install it on my regular laptop running fedora. Why does it need it’s own server?

      • chrono@apollo.town
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        1 year ago

        Well you can install it locally and get the web interface via localhost, but if it’s a proper server you can access the news from your sources from anywhere and you can also use 3rd party apps in your phone to get a different interface via the API

        • dan@upvote.au
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          1 year ago

          FreshRSS is just a PHP app so you don’t even need a VPS - you could even install it in a regular shared hosting account.

        • Drudge@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oh ok thanks. I do like the idea of access from anywhere… I’m guessing a VPN would be needed on the server and phone? Or is this a whole big thing?

  • bajabound@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Running a Tor exit node could certainly be life changing. Not sure in a good way, guess it depends which country you live in.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It’s a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn’t give you a call weekly.

      It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn’t make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they’re forced to kill my connection if situation doesn’t improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that’s not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.

      If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don’t have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.

      And of course there’s legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you’re living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.

  • itpcc@lemmy.world
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    PiHole!

    One of the easiest installer I’ve ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.

    • darcmage@lemmy.world
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      This was my gateway into the selfhosting world. I don’t think I would’ve kept going if it didn’t make such drastic difference to my browsing experience.

  • thoughtorgan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don’t want to expose while you’re out.

    • krist2an@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Immich is also a great Google Photos alternative. Though it is in active development and things may break, I’ve been thoroughly impressed by it.

    • whynotzoidberg@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Welp, I went down the wonderful hole of Actual today. Thank you for that!

      Let’s see if it takes over from my xls. I’m liking it. It’s quick and I see lots of potential.

    • PracticalParrot@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      My problem with Actual Budget is it’s only a singular currency. I deal with Euro, Dollar, Romanian Lei, British Pound. Having to manually convert each to Dollar, and then have a bit of discrepancy due to price fluctuations made it a no go for me. Have not found a good self hosted finance tracker that works for me yet.
      At the moment I am unfortunately using a proprietary one called Cubux.