Selfhosted

As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:

Paperless_ngx

ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts...). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to "scan" it, upload it, then bin the paper.

An actual life change that i didn't know i needed.

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I've always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool

Home Assistant. It's a rabbit hole, but it's great. I've got motion enabled lights, thermostats for "dumb" heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.

Self hosting nothing changed my life.

So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅

Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren't in the cloud.

Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.

I'll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich

Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix

Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you'll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.

Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing

For me it's 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I'm dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:

• Maps
• Calendar
• Email
• Markdown editor (I'm using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
• I haven't tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
• a bunch of other stuff I've never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.

FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one

Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:

• AdGuard Home is IMHO so much easier to use, although it has been a while since I've used Pi-Hole.
• CouchDB for the Obsidian LiveSync plugin
• Immich for a self hosted Google Photos alternative
• Nginx Proxy Manager for exposing all of my services
• Vaultwarden is invaluable for us

WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don't want to expose while you're out.

Portainer - For docker containers.

AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.

HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation

SearXNG - private search.

Whoogle - private search.

Shaarli - Bookmarks.

youtube-dl - downloading videos.

PaperlessNGX - document storage.

Trilium Notes - notes app

These are the ones I can't live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.

a tor exit node :P /s

Nextcloud to replace Google drive/docs. Jellyfin or plex for media. The arrs to aquire media (if you have the patience). A blog? A game server to play with friends.

I suggest using docker and docker-compose as it makes everything way easier. It does still take time and it can be frustrating but it is very rewarding.

Crosspost from the duplicate

After what happened to imgur and gfycat, definitely their own image hosting service.

You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want

TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it's available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.

Your own nextcloud instance. Then move everything that is saved at Google over to your own server.

Calenders, Filesync, Contacts sync with android works really nice.

Knowing my data is stored only on my own devices and google doesn't know more about me than I do is a nice feeling.

If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!

Home Assistant.