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’m a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
Linux - the gateway drug.
Its gotta be the sox.
That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.
I still have a means of booting up Windows if there’s a need (usually for a firmware flash too that doesn’t have a Linux alternative).
I was dual booting with Windows ME (which worked well for my computer). Distro hopping until I bootstrapped Gentoo from stage one.
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there’s a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it’s text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it’s not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it’s only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
sad OSCAR noises
I’ve been a media hoarder for decades, my partner is an avid dvd collector. I used to have lofty goals with friends about setting up our own server and media centers so we didn’t have to afford the world we live in. The friends fell off along the way, but I finally managed to make the dream happen. It’s bittersweet that I don’t really have anyone to celebrate it with.
Sorry to hear. On the upside, no one will be upset when the server goes down.
That’s true. Honestly I think it’s fine this way, I just wish I could send out little updates, take requests and stuff. Day to day operations is my love language and not having a valid reason to make an RSS feed or newsletter is just a reminder that I don’t have a community anymore.
“If you build it they will come”
I would love to get your newsletter!
Any chance you’re looking for a free jellyfin with a surplus of weird movies and music? It’s not fast, but it’s free!
Heck yeah! Where do I sign?
Check you PMs, I sent you the link!
I fucking hate tech companies
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.
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.
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.
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!
-Cable is insanity. It’s companies are corrupt and awful.
-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?
-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.
The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.
I’m a bum!
A 21st century bum with a bindle full of salvaged ram?
Now Playing: Bad Religion - 21st Century Digital Bum
I currently grow weed, train dogs, and build custom computers. The last one has become all but impossible though. Dunno what you’d call me.
I currently grow weed
Cannabis will grow just about anywhere. However, to make it do magic, it takes skill.
It’s just fancy/finicky tomatoes, when you get down to it. Lol. The “skill” is owning a moisture and pH meter, and reading the soil/ hydroponic pH a couple times a day. I’ve all but automated the process at this point, at least from clone to bud stages. Getting clones to root, and trimming the buds is basically all I have to monitor any more, but that did take like 3 years of tweaking to setup.
Oh, and I grow indoors. My grow rooms could easily be used as electronics clean rooms without much modification. I set them up that way to keep out insects. Specifically spider mites. Needless to say, I can also control the temperature, humidity, and lighting of those rooms.
I grow a few tomatoes myself. Not quite the operation you have going tho. After doing a significant amount of research, I have found that is does great for my seizure condition. One of the terpines of cannabis is Linalool, and it is an effective anti-seizure med. So, I grow strains that are high in Linalool. After a seizure, it makes for a better rescue med than Ativan. In all honesty, tho I think cannabis gets over hyped a lot, it has made a demonstrable positive difference in my life. It isn’t a panacea drug, but is definitely has many medical use cases. It’s a shame here in the US that rich, white, racist, capitalist’s legislation from 100 years ago, still bogs down it’s legalization.
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
I work in advertising
Same here, got locked out of my main gmail/google account and there was no real person to help me recover 10+ years of my stuff. Never again.
“I work in advertising” is an amazing signoff for this post. It works on so many levels, and I remain genuinely unsure which you intended. The bitter sarcasm of a veteran who saw this coming by virtue of having caused it? The smooth flex of a consummate professional? A stunning lack of self-awareness combined with simple earnest participation in the thread? In any case, thank you for making me stop and think :)
The bitter sarcasm of a veteran who saw this coming by virtue of having caused it?
a bit of this. Although in my defense, I wasnt working in advertising at the time (my company didnt even have an advertising division)
also, i dont work for one of the big tech companies that have their claws in your digital life. But i can see how it contributes at some level, however minor.
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.
My background is in graphic design/marketing and I’ve mostly worked in the non-profit sector. A few years ago I canceled my Spotify subscription after they hiked up the prices and decided I wanted a way to stream my own music collection from anywhere. I found Navidrone, began learning docker, fell down the Jellyfin/arr rabbit hole, and eventually stumbled upon Cosmos Server as a simpler way to expose my containers safely. It’s been a fun project and a welcoming community so far.
Bravo! CosmOS does look pretty nice. If I had better hardware, I might try something like that. Right now I’m using Fedora Server because of the SELinux, copilot, and podman support out of the box.
I’ve noticed that, too, about the community. I think part of the reason for the friendliness is a desire to see the community grow. Self-hosting feels very grassroots.
Cosmos
Bravo! I deployed it on a test server just to how it was. Nice UI, great features as I remember. Seemed like a solid product. It’s got a well stocked app store.
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
