Uptime Kuma maintainer here. The reason why I made this because I have some services like databases and websites cannot be down for a long time. I need someone send a notification to me if they are down.

If you think it is not improving your life, it is probably because you don’t have such similar scenario and you probably don’t need this indeed.

My point is that it may be not improving your life, but it improves my life at least, or others’. That’s just a choice.

I don’t run any containers.

I own my own data.

I back up my own computers.

My email is mine.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it, it’s not a competition, and you don’t have to do what everyone else does.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news…

I’d say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it’s just a fancy way to tag documents. I don’t need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There’s a “before paperless” era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

Now, it’s a solid 100%.

Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I’d say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I’d still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that’s pretty much the only thing.

Having Nextcloud, PiHole and LibreELEC/Kodi is something I wouldn’t want to miss

It’s all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It’s a wonderful mess.

For me the biggest is probably Jellyfin. Before, I needed to use external drives plugged into my TV, then browse them using the TVs file browser. I didn’t see which movies I already watched, or at which episode I stopped. When I wanted to watch something on my computer, I had to get the drive and plug it in there. The same for when I wanted something new. Now, I have Jellyfin running on my server, all the clients have access to it and I can watch my stuff whenever and wherever I like. It’s also easier to share something.

I think you’ve stumble accross few of the huge issues with selfhosting

- Developing apps is too hard, you have all the difficulties of SaaS development but with the added difficulty of having to support people installing your app in various setups

- For the difficulty, the return on investment is low because the community is much smaller than what you can touch with a SaaS software

This causes the breadth of available apps to be quite shallow, and additionally, another factor threaten further that diversity is that

- people gets into self-hosting in one of two ways. Either to create illegal media-center (in which case they install Plex, Jellyfin, *arr, download client, etc…) or to manage their document in privacy (Nextcloud, etc…) seems like you are type 2. This causes most projects to focus around those hot topics, without exploring other things (this year alone at least 4 photos albums backup software started development…)

But this state of affair is not sad or inflicting, it is natural for such as a young community to take time to find itself, especially in this difficult setting (I know selfhosting is not new, but I call it young because only recently did it start becoming so popular). And there are solutions to those problem too. On my end, like many other talented people, I am working on technologies to improve this situation, and hopefully one day we will see a large diversity of application growing, with much more accessible setup for people to run.

What I forsee will be big in the future

- Once we crack federation (I do not think current state of the technology is good enough) social app (Video sharing, file sharing, social media alternatives, news site etc…) will be big

- Going back to news, once we improve the QOL of SH for public sites, news agglomeration is going to be big as well (for blogs and stuff)

- Any mobile/SaaS app could have a SH counter part, that will automatically gain benefits from not being in the cloud. Im thinking things like various task management, productivity tools, and of course, home automation is gonna be the bigger winner for being in the home already, therefore workable offline. An example of this is already happening with cooking/recpies apps (Mealie, Tandorii, Grocy, etc…) which benefit from being at home, private, and accessible from the family, and home-assistant.

- Finally, SH is going to supercharge the development of very niche software. It makes no sense to develop an entire SaaS offering for 100 users (ex. a software to manage your model train would be very niche) because you have to pay for a domain, servers, and so on… But a SH app could literally cost $0 to run (for the devs) while yelding minimal benefits (either from subs or donation).

Give it 2-3 years for those stuff to develop better. In 3 years this sub will be almost twice as big at 500k, and you will have 2-3 times the amount of apps available that’s pretty much a garantee

I am legally blind. I got into programming and linux specifically so that I can improve my life, even though I don’t want to pursue an IT career professionally.

So, the short answer to your question is: most of my apps really do improve my daily life. And a good many of them I wrote myself.

Here’s a largely-arbitrary mind dump:

• Windows, unfortunately, has the best on-screen magnifier, so I cannot entirely leave the platform.
• However, most GUI apps and web pages suck. They suck in many fascinating ways that are beyond the scope of this comment, but I have found that some tasks are quicker to perform from a CLI than from a GUI. For instance, managing documents. I can write a shell oneliner faster than I can load a GUI app for bulk file renaming or whatever other thing people tend to do. I can tell gnuplot to produce a graph much faster than I can draw one by hand.
• Until very recently there wasn’t a Dark Mode for word processors. So I’d just write Markdown files in VS Code and then convert with pandoc.
• Math is much easier with scripting than with calculators
• Text to speech is a lifesaver. And sometimes you need to write your own whacky scripts to scrap webpages and read them out to yourself.
• I need to conform to academic referencing standards. Who’s got time for that? Nobody. Computers can do that for me.
• Web scraping — some websites are so bad, the only way to use them is to scrape then convert.

But that’s from an accessibility perspective and more programming than self-hosting per se.

Now from reading your OP, I think it is an attitude problem rather than a selfhosting problem. uBlock Origin and AdGuard (blocky, in my case) are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how TF to use them. Since I use uBlock in Paranoid Mode (basically a lite uMatrix mode with filterlists), I don’t need to block so-called tracker scripts at the DNS level. My DNS adblocker is only blocking ads. Ergo, things like shopping do not break. You are saying that it is easier to disable uBlock for shopping — but I can change DNS with one script. Just temporarily switch to 1.1.1.1 or something, and everything works. Where’s the problem?

I’m not sure what your complaint is with Bitwarden. It is not exactly hard to back it up when it is running in docker, and easier still if you use vaultwarden (much simpler backend).

You say that you use ‘Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard’ and they are not improving your life.

I’ll agree on the first two, but maybe that’s just because I hate webuis with a burning passion. But how are Authentik and Wireguard not improving your life?

Do you know why I use wireguard? I’ll tell you why I use wireguard.

A long time ago, I needed to go to hospital. I also had a university assignment due the same day as I was in hospital. Thought to myself, ‘no problem, I’ll just bring my laptop with me; I’ve got Google Drive Sync set up so I can work on my files remotely’. So I check in, boot up, log in, and what do I see? Old files. Old files from three weeks ago. Why? Because Google Drive decided to go on strike and, in true GUI App fashion, displayed a tiny error notification in the tray icon that you would need a microscope to see. Naturally, being half-blind, I didn’t see it. So now I am, figuratively up shit creek without a paddle!

So what do I do? Well, I deploy “KVM over Mom”. I ask my mom to drive back home — mind you, this is a 70-minute drive — and get her to bring my machine up. I walk her through getting into my machine and resurrecting Google Drive Sync. And then I spend 4 hours in the hospital queue finishing off my assignment.

That episode taught me a few things:

• Google sucks but I have to live with it
• KVM-over-Mom is not a viable long-term solution
• I need remote access
• Redundancy is good.

So, fast-forward a few months and I am using my dad’s NAS as a jumphost/proxy into our home network, where I can use wake-on-lan and RDP to connect to my machine. I have also switched from Google Drive Sync to File Stream (as it then was) so that my files are automatically available in gdrive. And that latter bit saves my ass some months later when my dad’s NAS has a disagreement with a kernel update and I can no longer remote in. We also have a hoard of Chinese bots hammering away at our internet-facing 16-year-old router, so that’s not great either. Also, ssh tunnels are neat, but are annoying to configure.

Fast forward a few years and an Unspecified Virus of Unspecified Origin that temporarily obviated the need for remote access, I now use a VPN. In fact, me being a somewhat cautious person, I use several VPNs, for remote access into my home network. There is a vanilla wireguard “in case things with multiple moving parts break” tunnel and more convenient mesh orchestrators, although I have a hard time finally deciding between innernet and headscale.

And does having remote access to my home computer improve my life? Yes. Most definitely. My home computer and server have much more storage than does my laptop. And sometimes you just need access to your copy of Hanks Australian Constitutional Law 12th ed, what can I say…

The issue I see with many self-hosters is that they start with a solution looking for a problem as evidenced by the frequent “I am bored, tell me what to selfhost” posts we see on this sub. It is much better to start with a problem and try to solve it. Then you don’t have to have an existential crisis over whether you are hosting too many replicas of postresql…

:wq

My vaultwarden and addi.io (former anonaddy) and immich are a KEY part of my homelab. Me (and my family) heavily rely on these 2 services in specific. All the rest can be considered superfluous.

Self-Hosting helps organizing my life, on productive days i plan every minute of the day,

from my self-hosted services i use multiple times a day:

iobroker

wekan

nextcloud

gitlab

mail

grocy

multiple telegram bots

​

sure for all of this is a commercial alternative, but i really hate paper and i’m fully organizing my life with this. All paper i have is scanned and saved, i don’t think it’s a good idea to give this amount of detailed data(including health and tax data) and important documents a commercial provider.

And i would feel everyday bad about my data being scanned. Self-Hosting is really important for me every day and makes me everyday happy

Using navidrome and jellyfin daily, and komga a lot!

Both. I have things that I host simply for fun, but most of my homelab is for experimentation.

I practice with different technologies so I can try to learn how they work.

Started out with a simple samba file server for remote editing

Then expanded into ipsec+ l2tp vpn server, then into ipsec + ikev2, then into wireguard vpm server and its been expanding ever since

Never stopped since then