I’d probably have to go with Audiobookshelf and Kavita. Behind those would be Invidous and Immich.
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.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Paperless-ngx is better than any hosted equivalent.
Everything else tends to be a lot more idle, but I’ve also got NextCloud, an IRC server, soon a Matrix server, an internal VPN so all my devices can always talk to eachother no matter where they are.
You’re self-hosting your email? Masochist.
It’s been set up for almost a decade at this point, it’s shockingly low maintenance once it’s all set up and going. It is a pain to figure out Postfix’s and Dovecot’s fairly arcane configuration files, but smooth sailing afterwards. It’s been a long time since I’ve even got a mail rejected/not make it to the recipient’s inbox.
100%. I’ve been running my own mail server for 10-15 years now and you’re spot on. I’ve wanted to migrate it to a more modern platform but I’m loath to relive the process of configuring postfix and dovecot. DKIM/SPF and Let’s Encrypt certs for IMAPS were also a bit of a headache to get sorted, and warming up the sending IP so gmail would stop sending me to spam… but once that’s all sorted it’s been very very hands off. I log in once in a blue moon to update it but otherwise it just sits and does it’s thing.
I self host one of my emails on my VPS. I can’t even remember the software I used it’s been that long. One issue I have is spam. Have you found any way of controlling that?
I have my mail server set up as a catch all so you can send to anything at my domain and it’ll land in my inbox. I use this to create usage specific addresses. If it’s something I know will produce spam, I just dev null anything going to that address. I can then also track where a spam source originated. For friends and family who email me regularly; they also know to append the current year to my email address, this allows me to rotate my email address every year.
I also run spam assassin and implement greylisting as well as blocking IP ranges from countries I know I’ll never receive legitimate mail from… it’s been an evolution.
Oh wow that catch all thing sounds like a really handy alternative to disposable emails. Thank you! I will also look into spam assassin. Logged into my VPS to remember what software I’m using - dovecot and postfix.
EDIT: installed and configured SpamAssassin. Thank you, that was easy!
I also can’t recommend greylisting enough. If you haven’t already enabled it in postfix I strongly suggest doing so. It’s one of the easiest ways to reduce spam. By simply bouncing emails from new sources the first time and forcing them to retry, it cut my spam tremedously.
navidrome and jellyfin
In terms of what services do the most:
In terms of user activity:
Plex, PiHole, Photoprism, Home Assistant, Syncthing in a hub and spoke config, Caddy for reverse proxy, custom containers for: yt-dlp, restic, and rsync.
Could you elaborate on syncthing hub and spoke?
Yeah I saw a post about it a long time ago on Reddit for users with lots of devices
Basically it is just setting up one or two “central devices” that know all the client devices, but not linking the client devices individually.
IE: One server is connected to your phone, laptop, tablet, desktop, etc. But the phone is not directly connected to your laptop or desktop or tablet.
To be fair I don’t actually know if this is the best approach anymore or if just connecting all of them in a mesh is better 🤷
Here is a forum post describing it.
ntfy and FreshRSS for me. Audiobookshelf recently joined and I am using it daily. (Inofficial probably the Arr stack though 😅)
I liked Audiobookshelf but the RSS feed kept breaking for me. I’d pull new podcast episodes for several days then it would fail and I’d have to recreate the feed. I wonder if they’ve fixed that yet.
Never noticed anything in the last couple of weeks. I had one podcast missing new episodes because the schedule was turned off. But I might not have had it turned on in the first place.
I’ve been wanting to set up Readarr, but I feel like it’s one of those things that can be pretty annoying to do with Docker because of the volumes.
Readarr is still just not good enough compared to the others. I ended up spinning 1 for ebooks and 1 for audiobooks to help make it less frustrating
Do you know if it’s any good at finding audiobooks on public sites?
I had to manually use audiobook bay as I couldn’t get it to work. Myanonymouse is amazing and pretty easy to get into
Jellyfin: An unfederated alternative to Plex, with some pros and cons. Very lightweight, customizable with plugins. Decent iOS and tvOS client from the devs.
Vaultwarden: Unofficial open-source fork of Bitwarden.
FreshRSS: Self hosted RSS + Atom reader, honestly the best way to read news ad free. I recommend using FreshRSS with lire if you’re on iOS.
I’m definitely looking into hosting PiHole down the line, and hopefully nextcloud once i get some more drives
Thank you for not just listing the names of some software. Everyone else in this thread is like “Crimble, JFlax, pIcomIco, Flerbl, and 17 Orangutans.”
I usually just ask recruiters to point those that are pokemon
17 Orangutans isn’t software, it’s just a bunch of apes I’m hosting in my basement server room. I trained one to answer level 1 trouble tickets, but manager said we need highly available maintenance processes. So, I got another container and put an orangutan inside it, and kept doing that until either we hit our KPI or we exhausted the budget.
Jellyfin, AdGuard Home, Nextcloud, Syncthing, Invidious, SearxNG
There are multiple ways to evaluate usage. I’ll go with what I would guess is your desired measurement, things that I use intentionally (as opposed to things like dns, which just happen incidentally to other things or automation based things which are continuously running but not necessarily interacted with):
pihole, wireguard, qbittorrent, sonarr/radarr, Jellyfin, syncthing, NFS.
I’ve considered Airsonic but I haven’t found a good client that looks good and doesn’t behave weirdly. I had one launch about 500 threads trying to transcode the same song which ate up my CPU time on my server resulting in a stern e-mailing from my host.