I’m not affiliated with this in any way but saw it posted at the other place & thought fellow Lemmyzens might like to take a look
Hi everyone,
Like in previous years, I’m running a survey about self-hosting. The focus is on your favorite self-hosted apps, but there are plenty of other (optional) questions too. The top five app lists are free response fields, you don’t have to select the suggestions.
Link to take the survey:
https://survey.deployn.de/s/self-host-2026
More info:
The survey is anonymous. Like last year, results will be published in aggregated form. I’m currently planning to publish them in December.
It takes about 10-25 minutes.
Some of you asked for more questions in the comments. I added a lot at first, then realized it took 45 minutes to fill out properly. So I threw some out again, but there are still quite a few. The survey now has a core section that mainly covers the MVPs (your 5 favorite apps), and you can switch on other modules if you want. Almost every question is optional and can be skipped. If you answer everything at a reasonable pace, it takes around 20 minutes.
The proprietary survey tool caused new problems every year, so last year I switched to HeyForm while the survey was already running. That wasn’t ideal for my purposes either, so this year the survey runs on a new app. It should also make entering your apps faster.
It’s still easier to fill out on a desktop computer.
Thank you in advance for participating.
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Radicale, Baikal, OPNSense, Home Assistant, AdGuard Home
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Pi-hole, Immich, Ollama, LubeLogger
Future Self-Hoster 🌱
- Next up: Jellyfin, Immich
Getting labelled “AI pioneer” would feel like being called a slur
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Home Assistant, Pi-hole, WireGuard, tandoor
AI Pioneer 🤖
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Gitea, Grafana, InfluxDB, LibreChat, Ollama
Lol, you suck
Why? Self Hosting AI is fine in my opinion
Where’s the training data from?
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: 1 device · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, Home Assistant, Immich
Reeks of Claude
I wanted to do the survey, but at some point the ui is barely understandable (#10 or so) and I gave up shortly after. And that’s from a nerd.
AI Pioneer 🤖
- Fleet: 1 device · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Loser
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 1 device · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Nextcloud, Traefik, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Audiobookshelf
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Home Assistant, Navidrome, Jellyfin
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
Looking at last year’s survey, the number of self-hosted devices has 2-3 first. And Raspberry Pi is most popular.
I wonder about this, because I have Pi for Pi hole, and one for Home Assistant, each dedicated. Then almost everything I self host is on a different server. But this still represents Raspberry Pi twice as much as the main server. I think Pis may be most popular because there’s many single-purposes uses for them.
I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.
If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)
I was thinking the same thing. My path was self hosting on old desktops for the longest time then the pi came out and I ended up doing a birdnet project, then home assistant and now I’ve got about a half dozen data collectors on pi zero 2 w machines. They are pretty much set and forget. I use an orange pi for my instance of Solar Assistant because I wanted something that was not affected by anything but the network and the inverter and I know how rock solid these little machines are.
But in the last few years I’ve started embracing docker and NUCs and have pulled apps off Synology, making it just a file server at this point.
So technically I have more raspberry pis than anything else but they are really just edge devices, except for Home Assistant. And it will probably stay that way until there is a good reason to switch. I don’t see that happening for years.
Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Plex, Foundry, Immich, Pangolin
