Opnsense
Vaultwarden
Email
Home assistant
Emby
Gitea
Paperless-ngx
Firefox
Honest question, I’d love to host email but it seems like a huge pain in the ass these days with trying to keep from being delisted. Is there a decent, home user accessible email system that’s useable out there?
A decade ago it was easy and doable but even in professional life I don’t deal with email backend anymore, all google or o365.
I use an SMTP Relay for sending mail, so I don’t hit issues with sending.
You’ll never get away from maintenance for ant service you host, and you need a VPS at a minimum to handle mail unless your ISP allows it (which they probably don’t). There’s going to be front loading needed in order to make sure the IP you’re given isn’t on blocklists, and you’ll need to take appropriate measures with Apple, M$, Google, Yahoo, etc in order to send email to their domains. The good thing is that I’ve you do that, you’ll never need to touch it again.
I personally use iRedMail because of the breadth of documentation, but mailcow and others like that are allegedly nice. I prefer the omnibus solutions because I don’t care to do manual service configuration if it’s not necessary.
Been doing email hosting for my domain for 25 years, 12 years with iRedMail.
I’m also using iredmail. Apart from it needing more hardware than it used to its been pretty stable. I use an SMTP Relay for sending mail, so I don’t hit issues with sending. Not that I ever actually send many emails.
Highly recommend purelymail. No nonsense mail, with straight forward pricing.
Firefox
You mean you self-host your profile?
No. I host Firefox that runs in a browser.
It’s one of my favourite things. So places that may block certain sites can be bypassed.
Not sure why I was downvoted for answering a question accurately.
How do you self host Firefox? This is something I’d like to setup!
It’s this: https://github.com/jlesage/docker-firefox
In terms of most used for me, it would be:
- Nextcloud: contains my contacts, calendar, and photos synced with my phone, as well as access to files on my server from any web browser.
- Home assistant: both automated and remote control of your lights, thermostat, etc.
- Audiobookshelf: only really useful if you have an audiobook collection
- Vault Warden: self-hosted bitwarden. Not really all that important to self-host, since a bit warden’s clients are open source.
- Frigate: only useful if you have security cameras.
- Navidrome: only useful if you have a music collection.
- Jellyfin: only useful if you have a movie / TV collection.
Jellyfin is also useful for music collection. I tried both it and Navidrome to start with, and ended up only using Jellyfin.
Gonna also throw in: Nextcloud Memories.
It makes the photo organizing part of NextCloud AMAZING. I’m so happy I got to dump Google Photos for good.
Did not know about this, but it’s exactly the extension I was looking for! Thank you!
I’m so glad it was helpful! You’re very welcome! I try to spread the word since NextCloud’s default photo app…scares people away frankly lol.
I now use an extension to customize the menu, so Memories effectively replaces the default app from a user point of view.
Using Memories in Nextcloud AiO simplifies things a bit, but I seriously consider it NextCloud’s “killer app.” It’s got EXIF editing, albums, user sharing, folder organizing, facial (and object!) recognition done locally, geo tagging map view…all local. The face recognizing stuff isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely good enough for the most part.
It’s also very easy to send to people outside NextCloud, but I run it behind TailScale so it’s not exposed to the open net at all. Copying and sending images through something like Signal also works fine. :)
It even has a neat Android app that sends my pictures to my server whenever I plug my phone in. (And moves them to my SD card in case something goes awry…but I learned I need to manage the cleanup of that part better lol)
Given all the other neat things NextCloud does, I like how it keeps photo managing in one place too.
Audiobookshelf also finds, manages, streams podcasts. After Google killed off Google Podcasts, ABS has been an even better replacement in my experience.
Audiobookshelf also supports podcasts (and ebooks, but I haven’t tested that).
Cool, I didn’t know. Going to try it out.
Podcasts are my primary use case (my partner uses audiobooks exclusively), and while it works rather well, I want to put in the caveat that there’s no working playlist functionality in the app, and IME headset controls don’t work from FF for Android.
That’s not a deal breaker for me, but it was a massive disappointment when I switched over. But the lack of playlist functionality in the app only annoys me when I want to follow one of the shorter news feeds, since I have to stop and select the next track every 5 min as the episode ends. No issue with that feed from the browser, so meh.
Works great through my reverse proxy/cloudflare tunnel setup, so not too many actual complaints.
There’s a player queue functionality (which works kind of like a playlist) but I don’t think it transfers across devices. But you can at least queue up a bunch of tracks on a device.
I’ve tried to use the playlist feature on my device a couple of times, but I still had to manually start the next episode. I might try again and see if I can figure it out.
Edit: no change in behavior sadly. Created a playlist and hit play, still had to select the next episode. Played the same playlist from the web client and it goes to the next episode, but headset controls don’t work.
Maybe post an issue report on their github. The queue function does work on desktop at least (the web client), but I don’t bother with playlists.
Do you have any experience with the dedicated Audiobookshelf app?
Yes, the android app is my preferred method of accessing my server. It works great, other than on rare occasions when it gets killed in the background for some reason, and my complaint about playlists from the previous comment is a much bigger irritation, but a very minor complaint.
The Android app works well. I rarely have issues with it, except when switching back and forth between the web player and and the app, when it sometimes doesn’t properly sync progress fast enough.
@bpt11 headscale is high on my list, since it enables everything else I host to be behind a tailscale VPN.
Radicale for calendar, tasks & contacts
Syncthing for file sync
FreshRSS is the best I’ve found for RSS
Jellyfin for media
Audiobookshelf for audiobooks (but really more for podcasts, in my case)Nextcloud for sure.
vaultwarden, jellyfin, freshrss, nextcloud, and wireguard
How is fressrss?
I am also running readarr and bookshelf
I used freshrss for quite some time, but the themes always looked a bit “off” for me. Went to miniflux and its awesome in its minimalism.
It’s perfect, better with themes
Any themes you specifically recommend? I just use native apps on my phone and laptop, but it would be nice to improve the theme when I administrate.
I’m using Mapco now but was previously using Swage. There are 11 options. Just fun to switch it up! I’m sure you can make your own as well but the options are an attractive change :)
Nextcloud, vaultwarden.
Audiobookshelf, Calibre-Web, Plex/Jellyfin, FreshRSS, NextCloud, DokuWiki.
For me, the most essentials are definitely:
- PhotoPrism
- Jellyfin
- Navidrome
- Wiki.js
For me:
- Card/CalDAV baikal : so that I can sync my calendar and address book across phone, tablet, workstation, and laptop
- Messaging prosody/synapse : private chatting with family.
- File sync Nextcloud : for access to various files. This is the only one that has worked consistently for me. Syncthing et al would constantly lose connection and the file I needed wouldn’t be there. Works fantastic for syncing Joplin notes.
- VPN wireguard : to access things remotely and securely
- Audiobooks audiobooksheld : I have a ridiculously large audio book library and enjoy listening to them when driving. This way I don’t have to preload my phone.
- Ebooks calibreweb : another large library. I have separate instances for different types: Magazines, regular books, RPG/gamebooks.
- Version control forgejo : for coding and creative writing projects.
- bookmarks shaarli : I find myself using this less and less. I use Firefox’s built-in sync, so I’m thinking about switching to separating selfhosting that instead of shaarli.
- Photos Synology : looking forward to immich getting stable. Once they get past regular breathing changes I’ll move over to that.
I have stopped using most of the services that got me into selfhosting. Things like rss and wikis. I try new things from time to time but kill them if I don’t find myself using them regularly or if the maintenance cost is more than the value add.
where do you source your magazines from out of interest? Are they epubs etc?
Every where and any where. They are a mix of PDF and epub.
My three essential selfhosted services are :
- an XMPP server
- a CalDAV server
- a bookmark manager (Linkding)
Omada software controller handles my wireless access points. HomeBridge lets me control various things from my iPhone, without having to use 5 poorly-made apps.
- thelounge
- git
- syncthing
Nextcloud.
I was hosting nextcloud at home for years. Then when I worked in a Datacenter I got to host some servers there from free so I set up a two-node proxmox with nextcloud and some other stuff. Now I don’t work there anymore and I really felt the hole nextcloud left, no more notes syncing for notes, tasks, calendar, podcasts no more place to upload my photos from my phone … So now I’m hosting nextcloud at home again.
I also host jellyfin which is nice but if I don’t have it doesn’t actively hamper my workflow.
I used to have a Nextcloud instance on a shared webhost… It ran like shit but you can’t beat the storage space… VPS storage is expensive.
Now I use syncthing on my home server
Zim + syncthing + mega
Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.
I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.
VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.
Same, Syncthing is amazing. I use it with Mobius Sync on iOS and have it synching my keepass, Obsidian vault, photos, and a folder for random file transfers between devices. It’s so much better, faster, and more stable than all the most popular corporate cloud providers.
I believe Syncthing has been discontinued unless someone else took up the project.
It doesn’t really look dead anywhere on their repo or website: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing Or are there different things with the same name? :)
Syncthing discontinued its android app on the play store.
Both syncthing and syncthing-fork are on F-Droid.
Just to be clear, what was discontinued was the official gui app.
Binaries are still updated and developed. The other gui app, syncthing-fork, still exists.
That would suck if so since I obviously utilize it heavily but this doesn’t seem to be the case? Latest release was just a month ago and their github repo is active.
This is absolutely not the case.
