I'd first recommend that you think about what you need.

What do you need? Do you want a safe space to back up your photos & videos from your phone? Or maybe a way to stream your movies, series and/or music in a cheap way?

Once you figure out what you want to host, you can look into which program can fulfill your needs. Check out the awesome-selfhosted list for a HUGE amount of services you could host.

Reading the title without seeing the category name ...

Pi-hole was really simple to set up. It was absolutely worth it and I've got it running on an old netbook. Very easy on resources.

Syncthing is also nice if you have files that you want easily shared between devices. I use it for sharing work files that I want synced between multiple devices. When I edit something it gets shared to all of my devices and it's always up to date everywhere.

Vaultwarden could be a good start. Everyone needs a good password manager, and setting up one at home is pretty easy.

You don't even need to expose it to the internet, you can start with a local installation (with some limitations).

Maybe install Debian and setup yunohost.

What ever you want? I would start by creating a virtual environment out of the gate if you have some hardware. Find yourself a minipc and then install Proxmox. From there you can create a single VM to play with. I would start by installing Nextcloud AIO in a Debian VM once you have an environment to play in.

(Side note: Make sure to follow good practices. Feel free to ask if you want more information)

I chose Nextcloud as my first project because I had an interest in the project for a while. I did an old fashioned install which I later rebuilt with docker. I learned a lot doing it manually twice first. I echo the others. Find a project you like, preferably with its own community so you can ask for help when you inevitably mess something up.

https://snikket.org/service/quickstart/

Is fairly easy and you might end up preferring XMPP over Matrix anyway ☺️

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #520 for this sub, first seen 17th Feb 2024, 10:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I chose Navidrome, with which you can stream music from your hard drive. It has very easy setup and it feels just great to stream your own music. I use Tailscale to connect the server to my phone and Ampery as an iOS app.

if IM was your need, check snikket.org although I can't remember how well they support OTP encryption... of course it's subjective how many layers one need, I'd be happy with just self-host and TLS, that's how far I'd go for me and my relatives for day-to-day privacy.

Cloudron.io to transform your server into a whole system with hostable apps preconfigured to install in a clic.