I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
If something interests you, set it up. If you find you don’t need it, take it down.
That’s pretty much exactly what I have done. I’ve hosted Plex, and Matrix in the past. Plex I will host in the future but Matrix was too much for me to host on my own, but the experience of setting it up myself was definitely worth it.
I recommend checking out Jellyfin instead of Plex. Open source, fully self hosted.
I found jellyfin easier to setup then plex and the dashboard is much nicer. I also love the quick connect option when logging into new devices.
I’m definitely keeping my eye on Jellyfin. Basically waiting for the mobile/tv apps to have more of the features that I personally want, especially on devices like my AppleTV. But it’s definitely a good project that I want to see improve.
i’d switch to jellyfin if plex wasn’t so polished. i ran into so many issues with jellyfin but plex just worked, even downloads haven’t been an issue for me. im sure jellyfin will improve, but I think it needs more time. Plex also has more client apps available.
i love the idea of more FOSS where i dont need to hit someone elses server to log in so here’s hoping!
Can I ask why the Matrix was too much? I’m thinking of setting up a Synapse docker container.
Well I don’t have a home server at the moment so I was renting out a server for about $40/month. Mostly because it was eating up a bunch of storage, and I was too lazy to swap from digital ocean.
Also I was using the ansible script and at some point I they changed something that required me to set it up again which I didn’t really have the time for.
I will say Ansible was a lifesaver. It made setting up and keeping the server up to date super easy.
I do recommend trying it out tho, just don’t use a domain name that is the same as your username or you will have issues with pings, especially if you share the instance with a friend. Learned that the hard way. Anytime they sent a message anywhere I was at, it pinged me, whether or not they intended to ping me.
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don’t like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I’ve cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
Once upon a time I set Grocy for my wife and I. It’s a kitchen inventory management site that can do some pretty cool things. I spent a whole weekend scanning every barcode in our kitchen and getting a bunch of recipes setup on the site. After all that we used it for maybe two or three weeks before it felt like to much work lol.
Do you remember if you were able to pull up items based on barcode? I’ve seen that you can record items based on barcode, but what I mean is: if I’m eating ice cream, can I scan the barcode so I can update the quantity quickly? Been searching their docs but can’t find anything 😅
I spent a lot of time setting up firefly-iii, a really neat and feature-rich finance manager. It’s a really great piece of software by a very responsive and friendly dev but after about 6 weeks I still couldn’t get used to it and ended up going back to paying for YNAB.
I swear by memos now though - highly recommended. It’s like having a private twitter stream where you can send thoughts, notes and files that you want to store/refer back to.
I spun up Firefly a few months ago and had about three weeks where I was actively categorizing transactions and reconciling everything and then my ADD kicked in. Really cool tool but I just need something low-maintenance for budget tracking.
Yeah agreed, I felt like it just needs a but more intelligence to auto import and categorise data. They do have an auto import plugin that uses bank apis but it’s tricky to set up and I always found it wasn’t all that reliable. I might go back and make some contributions to that project one day.
I really liked Firefly III but it doesn’t allow negative budgets, so I’m running Actual Budget now.
How do you like Actual? I set up Fireflyiii as well, but once I read that there is no way to share a ledger, so to speak, it turned me off a bit.
My wife has bookkeeping experience, so something that is a bit closer to double entry bookkeeping would be awesome, since it should fit easily into her quickbooks experience.
Currently looking at akaunting, which seems like it may work, if it is truly self hosted
I’ve been able to make it work for my wife and me. We don’t distribute income as it comes in, so I’m ignoring like half the numbers in the UI, but it’s working.
I’m in the US, so there’s no good self-hosted way to get access to my own financial data, so I’ve got all my credit cards and my bank account emailing me alerts, and then I’m parsing the alerts into Actual. I’ve also got budgets filling automatically using schedules.
I’m hosting Photoprism, now. But man, do I just barely use it. I’m not a photographer, and I always have the worst camera of anyone around me, so I’m never taking pictures. It’s running, and I’m not taking it down. But it did teach me to use docker compose. I switched everything I had after that.
Matrix was one that was hard to justify. It was just too heavy. My dream has always been “use one app for all communication”. I bridged Signal, Discord, and Facebook. Problem number 1 was that SMS is like impossible to set up. Problem 2 no one uses Signal except me and my wife. Problem 3 was that my Facebook got flagged for suspicious activity, and they wanted my ID to recover it. I used this as a chance to ditch Facebook, but I also ditched Matrix at this time. Signal supports SMS, so I could do more with it than Matrix. I’ll probably try again down the line.
My most used service is definitely my music service, Navidrome. You might try it, it’s very light. I used to keep all my files on my phone like you. And my phone had an SD slot, so storage wasn’t an issue. But I couldn’t listen from any of my computers, or at work. After I made the switch, I painstakingly re-‘aquired’ all of my music in FLAC, and have my phone set with a size limit of music to cache, as well as always downloading my favorites.
