I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
I’ve always been kinda technically motivated. The only reason I didn’t actually study computer science is that I had a great math teacher who made me fall in love with math. But I had it for a minor, and like to read stuff up from time to time. So, I guess I’m kinda in the grey area in regards to being a person in tech.
Anyway, I love tinkering with stuff, so I inevitably got into self hosting. Nowadays, I’ve even started maintaining some self hosted software.
I’m an industrial engineer who was hanging out on lemmy and my IT guy was talking about his piracy server, and well I thought that a legitimately aquired media server might be nice, and that home assistant thing sounded cool so he gave me the form to get two used desktops for free from the company. And well now I’m still fucking around with them every once in a while in anticipation for when my space will warrant actually using them full time.
It also helps that my local bdsm community had had self hosters who talked about it for years.
It also helps that my local bdsm community had had self hosters who talked about it for years.
I’ll have to admit, that is one of the most unique statements I’ve heard at Lemmy.
I fucking hate tech companies
Privacy and ownership
Linux initially, giving way for me to see that the best alternatives to me are generally the ones I control.
And considering geopolitics, where I can see how dangerous a well-positioned spy/saboteur/paid actor can be, my next self host project is some ActivityPub social media, at least as an one-user instance since I don’t want to act as a company yet, so I have control of where I’m posting from too.
The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.
Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.
Dude, yes! Subscriptions are a scam. They hold your downloads at ransom.
The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
- local backups to external drive (borg-web-ui docker)
- ntfy. To send noticiation to my phone after backup had finished
- diun. To notify when docker update is available
- dockgee. docker management
- tailscale. Remote access
All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.
HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.
Out of all services I run, my wife has as registered user on 3 of them, which are Immich, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. She basically uses only Immich cause it fucking rocks and she loves it!
I got laid off and needed something to do.
Lemmy has been a big part of it.
I’ve never been fond of paying big tech to spy on me. It has been getting gradually more expensive and more intrusive for years. Around the time I reached a breaking point, folks here helped me realize that digital sovereignty is possible.
One day I was just like, “Why does Google need to know when my lightswich is on?” And that was the start of it.
Piracy, basically.
Self-hosting wasn’t my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.
Piracy, basically.
Lol, you don’t say? Do you use something like Jellyseerr for requests?
Nah.
Piracy was just my gateway.
I dont have a media server anymore.
Mostly gaming. I self-host three different game servers (Palworld, Minecraft and Terraria on occasion) and will be adding a TeamSpeak server soon to replace discord. Is it the best? Prolly not, but audio chat is all we really use Discord for anyway so we don’t need the full feature stack.
I’ve been trying to get the boys off discord for years, and am finally getting some traction with the whole age verification thing. Sticking point is they want screen sharing, any ideas?
Teamspeak 6 is in beta right now, but does have screen sharing. I don’t know how stable everything is atm, but might be worth looking into and keeping an eye on.
If the pricing model remains the same, we can expect TS6 to have a free self-hostable server for up to 32 users (which is the beta licensing right now).
I don’t know of any FOSS programs that have it, but I’m sure you can ask around and find one.
Yeah, in the asking around/trying stuff out phase now. https://movim.eu/ is the frontrunner, TS6 and a bunch of Element Call improvements for Matrix are apparently just around the corner. Matrix is my best guess for where things are headed and the smart move would be waiting for it to mature juuust a little, but I want to act while I’ve got their attention and that means having something up and running by the time Discord asks them for an id
I’m an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any ‘junk’ they wanted to get rid of. I’d load up my wagon and back to the house I’d go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.
I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests…until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.
My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I’ve had just about one of each since then.
Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real ‘self hosting’ gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that’s about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.
From there, I’ve been selfhosting something or another but it didn’t start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.
I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?
I was paying for netflix, spotify, cloud storage, shared calendar software, the works. I’ve since moved my media watching to jellyfin, music to navidrome, storage to my server w/ offsite backups of critical files, baikal + open source calendar solutions. Anything I can replace with something I run myself, I do. And I’m always adding more. If you don’t count the fact that I keep expanding the scope of my setup and buying hardware, I save lots per month in subs of various kinds
Aah, I did not consider Netflix & Spotify. yeah that makes sense. I never paid for those either. But of course you can only self-host media if you first get it from somewhere*.
I do wonder who takes money separately/only for calendar hosting.
But yeah, all in all that amounts to a lot, and considering you can have a VPS with decent storage for under €10/mo. - it’s really the best solution.
I went for the full meal deal after getting some practice in, home server + raid array
By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.
I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn’t want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don’t have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora’s box was open.
Ooh, that is very cool! Do you think an rPi Zero could run Traccar? Mine is just collecting dust after I pulled it off my network because it couldn’t handle pihole traffic.
With a zero specifically I think you’d need extra bits to get it on a network, but Traccar itself is pretty lightweight.
Android phone and Own tracks.
I didn’t want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc… And that’s also how I ended up with a career in IT.
