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!
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!
For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.
It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.
A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.
For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.
Same! HA is a really interesting thing to get into. I moved to it from Domoticz, which is easy to get going but you hit some hard limits after a while.
I always like the idea of home assistant, but I haven’t figured out a practical automation for my home. Maybe you can share some of your most useful automation?
There’s a thread full of people’s favourite automations here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/467348
You can use it for the most basic of things and build from there. My first automation was turning off all the lights around my home at bed time (triggered by a button which makes it less automation and more remote control I guess). From there the bug bit me and I do all kinds of crazy stuff now.
The most practical is my load-shifting power automations. My power company has a rate plan that rewards you with really cheap power if most of the time in exchange for not using power during peak times. I selected this plan and automate a near-complete shutdown of the electrical systems in my home during peak times - the A/C goes off, the water heater goes off, the pool pump off, nearly everything except for lights. Total house power use during this time goes to like 400watts as a result. It has saved me hundreds on my power bill, even with adding an electric car that needs to charge every night!
The most magical is likely the automations around my bed. Both going to bed and getting out of bed are detected and magical stuff happens. When the first person gets into bed (either my wife or myself) almost nothing happens other than the lights dimming in the bedroom to get ready for sleep. Once the second person is in bed a bunch of things happen - all of the lights in the house go off, the doors lock (if they weren’t already), the garage doors close (if they weren’t already), the security system arms for “Home mode”, the HVAC systems go into eco mode outside of the sleeping areas, and a toggle is set for “Sleep mode” that allows me to have other automations make decisions based on it (like if an interior motion sensor turns on a light during sleep mode, the light is turned on at a low dim mode). When the first person gets out of bed after our wake up time of 06:00 the coffee maker will start brewing. Once the second person is out of bed the sleep mode is disabled and most of the home systems return to normal.
Another favorite is the nightlight mode for my kids. Their bedrooms are on opposite ends of a hallway with a shared bathroom in the middle. During sleep mode, if one of them opens their door at night, the lights on their side of the hallway will turn on to a very warm color and very dim, but plenty to walk by. The bathroom lights also turn on dimly and everything automatically turns off a few minutes after motion stops being detected.
I’ve got tons of stuff related to motion detection for security and such too. It’s really a sickness once you get into it. I can’t stop sometimes… send help…
How do you do the bed detection?
There are many ways to skin that particular cat.
I see lots of folks using variations of this homemade dealy: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fsr-the-best-bed-occupancy-sensor/365795
I however have a SleepNumber bed which heretically has a cloud integration in HASS that provides an impressively accurate presence sensor for both sides of my bed.
If I were to get a new bed I might build my own, or consider the Withings Sleep Mats - https://www.withings.com/us/en/sleep/shop which should just work with the HASS/Withings integration. The Sleep mats are too expensive in my opinion though I really like my Withings Smart Scale.
Not OP, but most people are using load sensors under the bed frame with an esp or raspberry.
In my case: door is unlocked + nobody in the hallway -> notification. State of the door lock accessible via app is nice by itself (did I close the door?).
Generally anything you want to do at home, but often forget.
Home assistant isn’t only for automations! I just use it as the smart hub for my house in general. I control all my lights and other smart home devices through the home assistant dashboard, it’s just like having one centralized app instead of many individual apps for every smart home device.
I use the esphome intergration to make my own diy smart home devices, and so much more.
Really if you have any interest in a “smart home” or using any smart home products on a reoccurring bases I’d say home assistant is worth getting into.
My cats like to look out our bedroom window in the morning. We have smart blinds. So I use an Ikea motion sensor to tell when one of my cats goes near our bedroom blinds and one of the blinds then opens just enough for them to look outside.
Another is we have indoor security cameras to spy on said cats when we’re away. But when we come home, I use Home Assistant to turn the cameras to face the wall and when we leave, it turns the cameras to face the rooms.
Sure. I don’t have many enabled right now but some that I’ve used that are probably useful to others
I have a zigbee smart lock that was relatively cheap but didn’t have a sensor on it to detect if the door is open or closed, just a timer built in. To make the lock smarter so that it won’t attempt to lock if the door is open, I’ve used a $10 aqara sensors to detect if the door is opened or not and then combined those with the door lock to say, trigger a door lock after 5 minutes of the sensory closing, but only if the door isn’t opened again.
Another Aqara sensor automation that I don’t use any more as we moved to a house that has a carport rather than garage, but I used a contact sensor on my ‘dumb’ garage door to detect if the door was open or not. If the garage door was opened, the garage light would go on. Could do this other ways such as with motion sensors etc but unlike a motion sensor this would keep a light on until the door closed.
I have a robotic vacuum that I would automatically turn on when every person left the house. If someone was detected returning within a KM of the home, the robot would then return to the dock so it was out of the way when people got home. I really really loved this automation, but I haven’t used it since having kids 4 years ago as there has inevitably been too many toys etc that the vacuum would pick up now days. If your floor is relatively tidy but, it’s a great way to do a vacuum.
I haven’t explored it yet but Home Assistant pulls in my data from my solar panels and battery. In theory I could probably automate some of my appliances based on power generation or battery charge. Haven’t explored that fully yet however.
Those are some thoughts. Right now I use it mostly to bridge devices that otherwise don’t talk together or integrate with HomeKit. Haven’t played around with the automations for a bit, but meaning to go in and have a play with it more at some point. It’s a product I tinker with for a few weeks then let simmer for months before coming back too.
Where would one find these sensors? And, are they supported by the vendor for a decent amount of time?
Anytime I’ve tried finding door-open sensors in this price range, I can never find brands that seem well known and reputable (thinking of vendor updates), or that won’t take two months to ship to my place. Or is that just the trade off for the price?
Somewhere such as banggood - https://m.banggood.com/Aqara-Zigbee-1_2-Version-Window-Door-Sensor-Smart-Home-Kit-Remote-Alarm-Eco-System-p-1149705.html
Usually grab them on sale. Also a few others from the Aqara family such as climate (humidity and temperature) that you can get cheap. Have a motion sensory from them too that works ok but i don’t currently have in use.
I combine these with a Conbee II and in home assistant I use ZHA (over deConz, which is an option too) to manage connectivity to the sensors. I don’t use the Aqara hub any more as I’d rather run things locally via home assistant than using a third party hub which removes any potential concern around privacy. I’m honestly not sure if these sensors are upgradable or not but they work reasonably enough. Maybe once every 6 months I need to spend 2 minutes reconnecting one but it’s not too common. It helps to have some ZigBee smart power plugs scattered throughout the house, even if you aren’t automating power to things, as they form a mesh network which can make battery powered sensors more reliable.
I picked ZHA over deConz largely in the basis it’s development was linked to home assistant so I figured over time it’d see more development from the home assistant devs.
I aim to use ZigBee where I can over WiFi or Bluetooth devices. Lower power and more responsive in my experience. Also frees up the wifi traffic and the more ZigBee things you add the more reliable the mesh network gets.
Thanks for the great response! Especially about the Conbee II and ZHA pieces. I’m slowly piecing things together for my first wave of home automation, and this will definitely help with the analysis-paralysis I’ll hit along the way!
Thanks for the ideas! I really like the third one
My favourite one solved a long-standing argument between my wife and I. I like to keep my office slightly warmer than the rest of the house, and she hates wasting electricity by heating it when I’m not there. She would keep lowering the thermostat when I was not working (like on the weekends), and I’d come back on Monday and wonder why I’m freezing in front of my computer.
I solved it with Home Assistant and a smart thermostat. Now whenever my computer becomes active, it sets the thermostat to my favourite temp, and when it’s asleep (or away) for more than 15 minutes, it sets it back to the “away” temp. Lights are also synchronized with the whole thing.
A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
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.
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)
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.
Self hosting is much closer to gaming on Linux than Windows imo, but it’s a great analogy nevertheless.
Totally, this means even more pain one has to like a little.
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.
It’s disappointing that this is the highest voted comment on a thread in the selfhosted topic…
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.
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
Yeah I’ve definitely reduced the load.
There’s a lot of things that are just unnecessary.
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.
Joplin.
You don’t strictly have to self host it but it’s gotten pretty good with a WYSIWYG editor now and everything.
Joplin is nice, but I’ve grown to love Logseq for my notes.
In that vein, Dendron in VS Code or VSCodium is equally amazing.
Logseq is alright, but I hate the interface vs Joplin the latter of which is really similar to Evernote. You can also customize the hell out of it by editing the CSS too.
I love Joplin until I have to use the phone app.
There is no background syncing and is slow as fuck to sync and I have loooot of notes… And there isn’t a way to like not sync all and just what I open etc…
So well I have yet to be able to use it on the phone as it hasn’t synced all yet and without the full sync it doesn’t show the notebooks/folders… Plus every time starts from the beginning checking…and yeah that is slightly faster but still until it reaches where it was last time still super slow. …
@XTornado @xaxl You can set the Sync interval on Joplin. I have mine set to 5 mins so it Sync every 5 mins and the first sync when I start the app takes a few seconds.
The issue is the first sync I am still on first sync… It is at 2000 from 17000 or somethibg like that. Ideally if somehow left the phone open on the app for hours it might complete but unfortunately I tried everything but my phone doesn’t want to stay awake with the open app but eventually close/locks. And since it doesn’t have background syncing…
Without the first sync the folder/notebooks doesn’t appear so is basically useless.
@XTornado What are you Synching with? In my case, I self host my Joplin server and on my local network, it took around a minute to Sync a few thousand notes on my Android phone.
Official Joplin Server Docker image hosted on my dedicated server. I would have setup WebDAV but somehow when I was setting up I didn’t see that it was an option and I thought I needed the Joplin Server.
This is what I do and it seems to work fine.
removed by mod
Does it support DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS? That’s one of the main advantages of AdGuard Home - you get encrypted DNS out-of-the-box, as it uses Quad9 over DoH by default.
removed by mod
Why would not link to official docker for blocky? Bit odd to recommend 17 pulls vs the 1 million+ one. Easier for people new to the software to get help if something is not working if they are using the same thing everyone else is using.
Can you provide more details as to why id want this over pihole? I’ve had a container on my interior server with pihole without issues for years. Should I change?
removed by mod
So how does an average joe use your link and set that up? I have no clue.
removed by mod
Here’s a link to the blocky docs with a little more explanation. The above link looks like it goes to the a docker image posted on the user’s profile… I think? ^I need to get more familiar with docker^
Yes its an image from a random account, not blocky.
For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn’t have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it’s really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi
Google has features that I can’t live without. Like Photos can add photos to an album based on face recognition - I have an album for my mother where my kids’ photos get added so she can keep up with what’s happening even though she lives far away from us. She posts comments that we read to the kids so they feel grandma is at least a bit involved in their lives. What’s also important is that it’s easy enough for her to use, she’s not very good with tech at 77. So, as much as I would love to get away from Google’s ecosystem, it’d be very difficult for me to give up this feature.
Another user posted about photoprism, which has AI powered features like facial recognition. Might be worth checking out.
He could also checkout Immich, which is much closer to Google photos UI.
Or the Nextcloud plug in Memories.
Wow that looks really cool, I’m gonna have to try it
a tor exit node :P /s
deleted by creator
I’ve been using Emby for a few years after Plex just became worse and worse, relying on cloud logins and being unreliable, pushing their own junk content above my library etc. Emby reminds me of what plex used to be, it’s amazing!
My vote is for Jellyfin. It is fully opensource.
deleted by creator
Plex has better client support though. Have you seen the Xbox app?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Tdarr for transcoding too.
What about hosting a web server, would it not be quite a change too?
Outline for your own VPN. You can even try it for free in tandem with Google cloud
Trillium notes and Bitwarden.
The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things
Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.
I don’t trust myself to not lose my entire Bitwarden vault in a house fire or failed hard drive
Self host gitea and then use pass and sync everything with git.
Now any device that can use git can have your passwords encrypted on it
You don’t even have to bother with gitea. You can just have a bare git repo on a server somewhere.
Agreed, VaultWarden is nice in theory but too easy to lose it all
I believe Vault/BitWarden caches all passwords on all devices. So you can create a backup anytime. Even when the instance is down.
Even if you lose your server in a housefire, you will still have the Bitwarden DB that is saved on your devices. Basically every device is another duplicate of the database. Pretty hard to lose everything.
Try Keepass. FOSS where the passwordDB is just an encrypted file. Sync with nextcloud/syncthing for concurrency, copy off to a thumb drive for backup and drop off at a freinds house, keep on your keys, etc.
How do i save this for later
Just hit that save button
How do I view comments?
Open your eyes and carefully focus them on the screen that holds this information.
How do I eat this sandwich I’m holding?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Open your mouth and stuff it in
deleted by creator
Parties.
Just until someone starts vomiting in places other than the toilet. In many cases it‘s better to be invited than to be the host ^^
So one can vomit on their server in return.
Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you’d basically be defederation proof.
How hard is it? Did you use the official guide? I looked into Mastodon and it was a bit too custom and annoying to spin up.
Lemmy setup about is as easy as you could make it. The ansible approach is very simple on Ubuntu. You need a host with ports 443 and 80 open and ssh key login for the server. Happy to help if you need it.
The Ansible install does make things a lot more simple, but it’s still pretty involved if you’re new to self-hosting in general. For example, you might need to set up an SMTP relay if you can’t port forward a workable port, and you also will probably want to change your Nginx configs to allow uploading larger images than a single megabyte.
A catch-all email server. I have a limitless amount of mail addresses going to me and my wife’s mailboxes. When an address gets leaked or start receiving spam I immediately know what company is to blame.