What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.

Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.

Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!

  • Jade@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    9 hours ago

    Here are some of the things I self host that I haven’t seen mentioned:

    • Continuwuity is a chat server that talks Matrix, so you can join the chat rooms of a lot of open source projects or make end to end encrypted private chats
    • Forgejo is a self-hosted code forge (github alternative) - very useful
    • FreshRSS is a good one if you like to follow blogs, newsletters or pretty much anything ‘news’
    • Grafana plus VictoriaMetrics and/or Quickwit is very useful for keeping track of the health of all your services
    • Homepage is a… homepage for all your services
    • Stalwart gives you a mail server. Set it up for any other projects that need to send mail, or as a backup for your emails, contacts or calendars - it’s the easiest way to set that up self hosted. Making it suitable as your main email may need more effort (delivery).
    • Related to Continuwuity / matrix, you can set up the Mautrix collection of bridges, which let you bridge Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, telegram, and more into your matrix account or chats seamlessly.
    • LMS (lightweight Media Server, not to be confused with Logitech Media Server) is an alternative to Navidrome that I find works better with my library tagging and ListenBrainz
    • Speakr - audio transcription with diarisation. Very useful if you like to record meetings.