not sure if this is on topic, but i self-host little apps i've made to solve very specific issues via claude code. i also self-host some of the most popular ones like Plex, Jellyfin, Actual, TeslaMate, etc. I think my favorite is Plex, but I feel that it has been going downhill lately. i tried to play a 480p video of futurama s1e1 on my phone. Brand new phone, strong wifi - would not play smoothly. No problem on my ipad, no my problem on my laptop. And even though i have a lifetime pass, i don't think there's anyway to report the issue or get support - at least not that I could find. I'm thinking eventually i'll just move everything over to Jellyfin.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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I love Immich. I've pulled in all my photos going back to high school in the early 2000s and it's so awesome having a timeline of them.
I love Immich for the fact that since I cannot hold peoples name in memory for more than a minutes, and I meet a lot of new people, so being able to take a photo and save their name is big for me.
Helps me when I study people's names periodically too
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Self hosting our budget with Actual has been a game changer for my partner and I. No other budget app really worked for us but this was super easy and the PWAs really make a difference.
Glad to hear people like it because I thought it was really cool....
...But not having that European easy bank import option and having to manually download your sheets and import them is probably why I didn't stick to it very well...
...but then again it imported those sheets like magic so there's that!
Since the last big update you can enable experimental support for enable banking, which support quite a lot of European banks!
Oh sorry, what I meant was there's a standard to do that with European banks, yeah, but US banks don't have it, so you gotta manually download and import stuff. At least that's how it was last I checked.
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The thing that really kills me with actual budget instead of firefly philosophy differences is that a "budget per month" app needs to have some flexibility with dates and categorization which I don't find in actual budget. At the very least, setting a different "beginning of the month".
I get paid on the 27th-30th of the month, that is my budget for the following month but according to actual budget, that is my budget for the month of money I have already spent. Likewise with bills, I transfer money to an account where all the bills automatically come out of after I get my paycheck, but those are bills coming out of the budget for the following month.
You can't budget with money you don't have yet... Especially for people with variable salaries (Belgium pays money for the days you bike to work, getting expenses paid back, etc...)
If I transfer my bills money on the 1st of the month (last possible day) and then before the 1st of the month the next month, then all metrics and budgeting for 2 months are fucked up and inaccurate with no way to fix it.
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I run many of the usual suspects, but I would say Home Assistant is on the top of the list.
- Integrates with seemingly endless smart home devices
- Make automations that make your house seem like magic
- Make it look just how you want it to
- and best of all, it costs ~~numerous hours of tinkering~~ nothing!
Hook it up to a UPS and it basically has 100% uptime regardless of internet connectivity or power. I love how resilient it is.
The only drawback is that most smart home devices aren't on the UPS, so if power goes out, you still lose most connected devices.
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apart from the usual suspect like, Jellyfin+Plex (still have some straggler users that need to upgrade their players for JF to work properly), Immich, nextcloud etc, I really like running Birdnet-Go. I give it my CCTV camera feeds and it uses a NN to identify birds it hears.
I get statistics about species heard around the property, charts to correlate detections to seasons and weather, and some interesting info about rarer species that I didn’t know were in my area. Every morning I check it to see if there was anything new recorded.
it doesn’t really have a purpose, though the data can be submitted to larger databases, but it's just a nice thing to have.
EDIT: Also Vaultwarden, forgot about that, super happy to be hosting my own password manager instead of trusting (and paying for) companies like Dashlane to host it like I used to.
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Navidrome for me. I have a physical collection of around 2000 albums across CD, vinyl, and cassette, plus a lot of digitally only purchases over the years. Finally getting it all on my own server and being able to just tap a button to shuffle the entire collection is just about everything I ever wanted.
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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.
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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.
Email's probably the most satisfying. I learnt a lot in setting up my own email server, and it's nice being in complete control (well, of my end of things at least, ofc not of the other person's end) of such an essential service.
Damn, never heard anyone enjoy hosting e-mail servers
that's crazy though
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OpenWRT, pihole, immich are among the most well-functioning powerful and clean pieces of software I have ever used. They just work.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Just gonna say it.
Stash. Is a great FOSS media management platform for primarily adult content.
Selfhosting porn is the most neckbeard gooner thing I've heard of :))
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It's kinda good the scratch hdd I was using for stash died. I was getting a little too into curating that library and it was changing my relationship with adult content.
10/10 app though, would recommend
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Everything, from Nextcloud to gaming servers!
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.
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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 :)
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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.
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.
- Customized keyboard shortcuts for next and previous.
- I added webmention support which allows me:
- Determine if a site supports webmentions
- Allows me to send a webmention like
- Allows me to send a webmention comment
- I can share and sydicate a link from my feed reader to my website
- I can save a link as a blog idea, like if I want to respond or write about a topic for example.
- Custom filters so I can basically mute certain keywords from me feed.
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Immich
Jellyfin
HomeAssistant
Dawarich
HortusFox
In that order.
Things like the *arrs, traefik/authelia, etc. are just a necessity and not something that gives back like the 5 mentioned at first.
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