A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I found https://github.com/TwiN/gatus recently and its been a welcomed alternative to UptimeKuma (I have many hosts I monitor, so having a configuration file makes it far easier).
I run a Prometheus server at work, for doing ICMP latency checks, thats all I need at home. Gatus is super simple for my needs.
Possibly underrated: CopyParty. Its an entire fileserver in a little over 1 MB. You can host it on anything that runs python and the client can be anything with a browser. It's unbelievably simple and efficient. If I knew self hosting was this easy I would have started sooner.
I feel like the world is sleeping on ForgeJo — it’s such a capable and easily hostable alternative to gitlab/github/bitbucket.
The CI turned me off though. It's like they saw how bad GitHub is for CI and said "no notes. Just like that"
And I use the CI config a huge amount.
Huge shout-out to Forgejo. It's blazingly fast, even on low resource devices. Throw it on a Raspberry Pi and chuck it in a closet. I betcha it would have better uptime/reliability than GitHub.
I love forgejo!
It's literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can't imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.
Gitea's okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I've hitched my wagon there and couldn't be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, so it seems like direct migration is no longer possible. That said, git repositories are git repositories, and they have most of the important history and stuff inside them already, so unless you're super attached to stuff like issues and whatever you can still migrate, you'll just lose some stuff.
If you have a need for Calendar or To-dos, Radicale is a nice CalDAV/CardDAV server that's pretty tiny. For me its sitting there at idle using 35MB of RAM.
ErsatzTV 🫡
Heads up, ersatzTV is no longer being developed.
2nd time I'm hearing about this service today. How's the experience?
Radicale - I ditched Nextcloud for it as no-one needed to see a calendar, it's on their phone...
I also use it to sync a calendar for Home Assistant too
And it effectively backs up my Contacts too.
MeTube, for when my friends send me a video on a service I don't use (facebook, instagram, tiktok). It supports a lot of sites.
What's the flow there? Receive link, copy, open MeTube, paste, download watch?
Tiktok and Instagram links are so frustrating when friends send them.
Yeah, that's about it. You can watch it directly in the browser as well.
I have never thought of doing this. That's now going on my server.
KOreader Sync if you use KOreader. Easily pick up where you leave off on other devices!
I also run Wiki.js to (inconsistently) document what I'm doing with my apps and server.
Thanks! I own an e-reader, but as the stock software has served me well so far, I haven't had any reason to switch. Is KOReader worth it?
My favorite part of koreader is the reading statistics and historical calendar view
KOReader is great, basically swiss army knife, you can configure everything. Not the most intuitive UI though.
I moved all my books out of Amazon last year and host them for my family with Calibre Web. Jailbroke my Kindle and use KOreader exclusively, so I use Sync so that if I need to read while I'm out, I can just pick up on my phone.
The chance that I will do anything else but reading when using my phone is big, so the sync maybe not as relevant. That said, using KOReader with a centralized ebook library still sounds really useful. Thanks!
XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.
My favorite as well.
Nice! I think XMPP is the best approach to messaging, as it is decentralized and can be E2E (and more mature than e.g. Matrix). The problem is that I won't be able to convince anyone I know to use XMPP (Signal was a huge struggle already).
For now you can use XMPP with the Slidge Signal gateway. At some point there will be an issue with Signal due to their centralized servers in the US and then you will be happy to not depend on it so much.
I enjoy gotosocial, its such a lightweight fediverse server
Does it work well with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.? Or do you still have separate accounts there?
It works with most fediverse platforms (its in beta still, but gonna come out of beta soon!) not so much with lemmy as its more so microblogging
Sounds interesting. Thanks!
Small static websites. You can get surprisingly performant and easily managed websites if you don't actually need the overhead of common frameworks. For instance giving your kid a real domain they can update and show to their friends.
On the slightly more resource intensive side, OpnSense has been a game changer for me.
I’m a big fan of static site generators. For the websites I maintain, switching from WordPress to Hugo reduced my workload a lot.
I set up a workflow using DecapCMS + Hugo + GitHub. Non-technical users can log in via GitHub to edit content on the CMS, and GitHub Actions automatically builds and deploys the site via SFTP.
GitHub is kinda meh, but it’s low-cost and gets the job done.
For blogs I found two interesting projects that are super minimal.
BashWrite uses only bash and sed commands but it seems to be no longer under development.
Another bash script that seems to have more development activity is BSSG. This one requires a markdown processor such as cmark or pandoc but it's still quite minimal.
I love minimalism and writing scripts so these two projects really interest me.
Well now you've got me trying BSSG :p
I'm in the process of switching from ipfire to opnsense myself.
I hate how bloaty opnsense is at first glance but it has so much more control so once I copy my current config I'll be leaving ipfire in the dust.
Nice. Haven't tried IpFire but gonna give it a look. Been on OpnSense for a couple years now and have been enjoying it.
Grist
I know use spreadsheets for just about everything
I used to use Nextcloud and put files in there instead of Google Drive. That’s ok, but turns out, way more than I need. I use Nephele with the Owlfiles app now. It’s less resource intensive. Also, I can manage actual folders on my server. I have a simlink to my Jellyfin media folder and manage it from there.
Favourite? Probably Kavita.
I'm looking to sell Forgejo next myself