Selfhosted

For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi

Let me throw in Paperless NGX, https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Vaultwarden!!! There's lots of nice things that may or may not be good for you depending on your needs. But vaultwarden is straight up essential.

PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).

https://www.photoprism.app/

A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee

Home Assistant.

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I've always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool

syncthing works on every device and substitutes for cloud storage services. pictures taken with a phone end up quickly in the shared folder on my desktop. etc.

I'm hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server

SearxNG for search: https://docs.searxng.org/

You can try it using a public instance if you like, but since installing it is easy and painless, just go for it.

Anyone have a solid how-to for the layman to host their own lemmy instance? I heard it improves browsing a lot.

Calibre docker stack; Calibre Guacamole instance, CalibreWeb, Openbooks set to save to the Calibre autoimport folder, and FBreader hooked to the OPDS endpoint for calibre. Its like having an Amazon Books ecosystem of my own.

Trillium notes and Bitwarden.

The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things

Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.

For me, it was a wiki/knowledge base - I've had dozens over the years as I've tried to find the 'right' one, but I'm currently a fan of @bookstack@fosstodon.org. My brain's not always the most reliable, and so my wiki becomes my 'external brain'. A lot of people are using things like Obsidian/Notion/etc in the same way.

ActualBudget. If you don't already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/

Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline, which allows for self-hosting. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.

TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it's available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.