Uptime Kuma maintainer here. The reason why I made this because I have some services like databases and websites cannot be down for a long time. I need someone send a notification to me if they are down.

If you think it is not improving your life, it is probably because you don’t have such similar scenario and you probably don’t need this indeed.

My point is that it may be not improving your life, but it improves my life at least, or others’. That’s just a choice.

I don’t run any containers.

I own my own data.

I back up my own computers.

My email is mine.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it, it’s not a competition, and you don’t have to do what everyone else does.

Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There’s a “before paperless” era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

Now, it’s a solid 100%.

Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I’d say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I’d still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that’s pretty much the only thing.

It’s all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It’s a wonderful mess.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news…

I’d say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it’s just a fancy way to tag documents. I don’t need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

Having Nextcloud, PiHole and LibreELEC/Kodi is something I wouldn’t want to miss

I’m building a home lab to learn. The fact there’s functionality and privacy is a good learning driver, but entirely the purpose. I suppose eventually there may be ROI, but that’s not a focus at this time. :)

Both, docspell has eliminated all of the filing cabinets in my house (the only thing left is the fireproof/resistant safe for things like birth certificates, SSN cards, etc.). Outline is my note taking and documentation tool, Jellyfin is where most of my media lives now, ChannelDVR gives me access to TV via Jellyfin, etc.

But I also really like playing with random open source projects and seeing if they have any use to me.

Bitwarden, Pi-hole, Calibre, Jellyfin, *arr apps. Caddy for reverse proxy which is the only “meta” docker I am running.

That is it for me.

I started down the Authentik SSO path but am thinking that it isn’t worth it and I’ll probably walk that back.

Home Assistant, Mealie, and Blue Iris are my daily life improving apps. My kids really enjoy the Ark server too.

I need to get more use out of my plex setup, but my Fire Cube v1 in the bedroom doesn’t run much reliably anymore.

Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, local storage and email are used constantly. All bring great improvements.

Ansible and Zabbix provide ‘support’ for these applications.

Media streaming is a ‘nice to have’ but not essential. Wireguard is seldom used but still very important.

Rely on a lot of my selfhosted stuff like my media stack, immich, syncthing (phone backups), home assistant, vaultwarden. Saves me a bunch of money from subscriptions

Selfhosting a VS Code server was one of the best decisions to increase my productivity.

Little bit of both I suppose. I find it very enjoyable to have a server at home to tinker with, I’m also enjoying providing media to my friends and family (and myself). I don’t use many self-hosted apps outside of media though, really only nocodb, immich and memos