Selfhosted

I think there one I never expected would be Kitchenowl. Shopping list, recipe list, planner for food, expenses... very useful for a joined household.

Been using anytype.io (self-hosted) for a month now and it has been amazing.

Using it as a journal, bookmark manager, general note taking, etc...

Self hosted Librespeed. Just so usefull to know if I or my ISP screwed up!

Syncthing. Decentralized data backup that works with minimal setup. Now I can add cloud sync to most any app.

Actual Budget a selfhosting budget software. It helps me keep track of my finances

The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.

I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.

It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.

https://mealie.io/

Recipe manager and meal planner which can pull recipes from the web. I started using it after a few recipes on sites disappeared. My families most used app (besides plex).

Immich! Backs up my phone pictures for my family with automatic backup through an easy app interface. Knowing my large album of photos on my phone won’t be tied to an endless growing subscription fees for…ever?!

Never knew I needed? Another vote for Paperless-ngx. I still feel like I'm living in the future using it. The trick I've found was initially setting up a good document naming & management convention & following it religiously for every document. The search function is fantastic at narrowing down results. Used in conjunction with specific coloured tags I can immediately see what I need from search results.

Fired up Immich recently. Amazing. Will be donating as I like their stance.

I also enjoy Linkwarden. Switched from the also excellent Hoarder as I prefer the UI.

Most used? Nextcloud with Joplin.

That's easily Home Assistant. It got me into the whole home automation stuff and I have gradually included more and more parts into it - including some health related stuff. It really makes my family's life easier and helps us organizing it.

I host Immich, Jellyfin , readeef, and open-webui for myself. From those, Immich is definitely the unlikely hero of the bunch

Forgejo. There are so many things that can use a git repo but I don't want to have them out in the wild, so I host them myself, safe and sound behind my firewall.

I also mirror other github forks so they don't go away whenever those services decide to rugpull them.

Paperless - Pay slips, Bank statements, MOT records, Insurance policies, User manuals, restaurant menus. All filed and searchable. Letters I get are photographed, uploaded and immediately disposed of, zero stress.

n8n

thought it was overkill. now does tons of things.wouldnt wanna live without it.

I'm hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don't need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don't have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.

Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that's extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally "just update" (it's all wrapped up into "just" tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn't update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.

I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from , and this is the best compromise.

I'm using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn't manage to get one.

And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I'm sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.

FreshRSS, i had it installed and setup with a fee feeds for over a year and only like this month has it become my daily read, i can get almost everything in there to just read through while I drink my coffee, sites I bookmarked but never go to can now come to me.

Also with 'five filters full text rss' to get all the images in the feed

https://ntfy.sh/

Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple curl is plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).

Unpopular opinion from what I've seen in this forum, but for me it is Nextcloud followed by Jellyfin.

I use Nextcloud setup fory whole family, about a dozen all together. I even sprang for the DavX5 plugin for several people so we can share calendars and contacts as well as files and notes. We backup photos from our phones using the Nextcloud app. Several of us use it as a backend for KeePass.

We use Jellyfin for streaming; movies, tv, music videos and music. It is the backend storage and library organizer for four Kodi boxes, five browsers, several phones and tablets and a couple of Roku's. It works like a champ, even with the occasional library re-sync.

PaperlessNGX Syncthing

Paperless is rEally awesome... Scan to folder, it will automatically be sorted and categorized, full text search and one neat thing: It just stores the pdf in subfolders which makes backup also usefull without paperless

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Happens to be more useful than I originally thought.

I’d say the ARR suite but I knew beforehand that would need it. I just love that I can access overseerr, search up and coming and already out content, click “request”, and then magically it just shows up on my plex after a couple minutes.

A service that I host that I never knew I needed is Nextcloud. Works exactly the way OneDrive worked for me. I record footage on my phone, upload it to Nextcloud, and log onto any computer of mine in the house and can edit the footage. Sometimes I edit footage in VR while I play XPlane, then I’ll save it, turn everything off, and continue right where I left off on my laptop.

Probably super basic but locally syncing things is a godsend to the way I used to do things (KDE connect transfers footage from my phone to a single computer).

Pair Drop

Quickly send files, paste images/text snippets between devices.

I'm using the older Snapdrop (which PD was forked from) with some patches I made to:

• Work behind Authelia for SSO + 2FA
• Use the display name provided by Authelia instead of the random usernames it gives out by default
• Send transfers over the internet without dealing with the temporary "rooms" that Pairdrop uses (it's behind Authelia, so only authorized users can get to it).

It has 100% replaced emailing things to myself or shuffling files to/from Nextcloud. I probably use it to send text (URLs, clipboard contents, etc) to/from my phone as much as I use it for sending files back and forth.

https://radicale.org/ is taking care of our address books, shared calendars for the family, todos and notes, all with one Backend but many different clients on different operating systems.

I'm really fond of readeck. After being dissapointed with Pocket and Wallabag, I went with omnivore until they pulled a skiff. Out of all the FOSS read-it-later solutions - it was a very even tie between Shiori and readeck, and I went with the latter since it supports highlights.

Jellyseer

Even though I don't have it hooked into an arr stack it is still useful for what is upcoming.

Joplin.

Ive been paying for Workflowy and honestly, I've reached my limit of cost vs value.

I needed a way to do more than just bullets, like Evernote without the bloat, or OneNote/Notes without the megacorp, something I can export and read 100 years from now.

I was surprised how often I use it, and slowly weening off of Workflowy.