ErsatzTV 🫡
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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If you have a need for Calendar or To-dos, Radicale is a nice CalDAV/CardDAV server that's pretty tiny. For me its sitting there at idle using 35MB of RAM.
Grist
I know use spreadsheets for just about everything
Radicale - I ditched Nextcloud for it as no-one needed to see a calendar, it's on their phone...
I also use it to sync a calendar for Home Assistant too
And it effectively backs up my Contacts too.
I feel like the world is sleeping on ForgeJo — it’s such a capable and easily hostable alternative to gitlab/github/bitbucket.
It's literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can't imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.
Gitea's okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I've hitched my wagon there and couldn't be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, so it seems like direct migration is no longer possible. That said, git repositories are git repositories, and they have most of the important history and stuff inside them already, so unless you're super attached to stuff like issues and whatever you can still migrate, you'll just lose some stuff.
Pihole again, Vaultwarden, forgejo, syncthing
Thanks! I thought Syncthing does not use central servers? Whats the benefit of using one?
In addition to what others have said, Syncthing will use public relay servers if it can't make a direct connection between your devices. Everything is encrypted, so it's not unsafe or anything as far as i know, but if you want to run your own private Syncthing relay server, you can. (Or run your own public one)
I'm not PC but, one benefit of using a central server for syncthing is an always on backup that doesn't require another client device to be on, it also allows for easier creation of new shares.
For example, with syncthing you can set the "servers" client device to auto approve/accept any shares that are to trusted devices, then when you get a new device, instead of needing to add that device to every device you share on the syncthing network, you only need to add that device to the server and then you can have your other clients connect to the servers share instead of device to device. It's easier. You can also configure the shares on the server to use encryption by default too, since you don't really ever need to actually see the files on the server since it's basically a install and forget style client.
As an example of what I mean:
I have 10 different devices that run syncthing, 9 clients and a "server" client. these clients are not always on at the same time, and as such when I change a file, the files can become desynced and cause issues with conflicts. By having a centralized server, as long as the server is on(it always is) and client itself is online, it's going to always sync. I don't need to worry about file conflicts between my clients as the server should always have the newest file.
Then for example say my phone died. Instead of needing to readd every seperate client that the phone needs to share with to the new device, I only need to add the phone as a trusted source on the "server" client via the webui -> click share to that device on every share the phone needs, and then remap the shares to the proper directories on the mobile device. this is vs having to add every device to the phone, and the phone to every device it needs access to ontop of reconfiguring all the shares. It's simpler, but fair warning does cause a single point of failure if the server goes offline.
I did not know that. Thanks for explaining!
MeTube, for when my friends send me a video on a service I don't use (facebook, instagram, tiktok). It supports a lot of sites.
I have never thought of doing this. That's now going on my server.
What's the flow there? Receive link, copy, open MeTube, paste, download watch?
Tiktok and Instagram links are so frustrating when friends send them.
Yeah, that's about it. You can watch it directly in the browser as well.
Ohh good idea! At some point they stopped sending me videos as I was not able to watch them anyway :( thanks <3
KOreader Sync if you use KOreader. Easily pick up where you leave off on other devices!
I also run Wiki.js to (inconsistently) document what I'm doing with my apps and server.
Thanks! I own an e-reader, but as the stock software has served me well so far, I haven't had any reason to switch. Is KOReader worth it?
KOReader is great, basically swiss army knife, you can configure everything. Not the most intuitive UI though.
I moved all my books out of Amazon last year and host them for my family with Calibre Web. Jailbroke my Kindle and use KOreader exclusively, so I use Sync so that if I need to read while I'm out, I can just pick up on my phone.
The chance that I will do anything else but reading when using my phone is big, so the sync maybe not as relevant. That said, using KOReader with a centralized ebook library still sounds really useful. Thanks!
XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.
My favorite as well.
Nice! I think XMPP is the best approach to messaging, as it is decentralized and can be E2E (and more mature than e.g. Matrix). The problem is that I won't be able to convince anyone I know to use XMPP (Signal was a huge struggle already).
For now you can use XMPP with the Slidge Signal gateway. At some point there will be an issue with Signal due to their centralized servers in the US and then you will be happy to not depend on it so much.
I used to use Nextcloud and put files in there instead of Google Drive. That’s ok, but turns out, way more than I need. I use Nephele with the Owlfiles app now. It’s less resource intensive. Also, I can manage actual folders on my server. I have a simlink to my Jellyfin media folder and manage it from there.
Forgejo, pihole, freshrss, baikal, mealie, wg-easy, searxng
Thanks for the suggestions. Are you happy with the search results and UX of SearxNG?
Yup very. I get better search results every time
Lovely! Thanks for the suggestion <3
I made a solar powered phone server. It was great!
Oh cool! So like an android phone running services? What did you manage to get running?
Just a nginx server. And it would show the cirrent battery. I had plans for other stuff, but the pixel 6a is a fire hazzard. And its too hot now for cells outside (almost 100 today). So it got decommisioned.
Now theres a meshtastic node connected tp the solar panels.
Reminds me a bit of the webserver on a vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
Supporting the network with a node is honorable work too :)
I enjoy gotosocial, its such a lightweight fediverse server
Does it work well with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.? Or do you still have separate accounts there?
It works with most fediverse platforms (its in beta still, but gonna come out of beta soon!) not so much with lemmy as its more so microblogging
Sounds interesting. Thanks!
Small static websites. You can get surprisingly performant and easily managed websites if you don't actually need the overhead of common frameworks. For instance giving your kid a real domain they can update and show to their friends.
On the slightly more resource intensive side, OpnSense has been a game changer for me.
I’m a big fan of static site generators. For the websites I maintain, switching from WordPress to Hugo reduced my workload a lot.
I set up a workflow using DecapCMS + Hugo + GitHub. Non-technical users can log in via GitHub to edit content on the CMS, and GitHub Actions automatically builds and deploys the site via SFTP.
GitHub is kinda meh, but it’s low-cost and gets the job done.
For blogs I found two interesting projects that are super minimal.
BashWrite uses only bash and sed commands but it seems to be no longer under development.
Another bash script that seems to have more development activity is BSSG. This one requires a markdown processor such as cmark or pandoc but it's still quite minimal.
I love minimalism and writing scripts so these two projects really interest me.
I'm in the process of switching from ipfire to opnsense myself.
I hate how bloaty opnsense is at first glance but it has so much more control so once I copy my current config I'll be leaving ipfire in the dust.
I think you will be back at Ipfire soon. OPNsense is a confusing mess and while IPfire certainly has its issues, at least it is easy to understand and it does what it is supposed to.
yea I have the machine backed up in case this happens. I have noticed that its a mess UI wise. But ipfire doesn't seem to be stable. every few months it'll randomly kill itself which will take everything on the network down until i manually restart the machine and then force tell it a new DNS server. It's something I've never managed to resolve on the machine, and I don't seem to have that issue with my test network with OPNsense.
Favourite? Probably Kavita.
I'm looking to sell Forgejo next myself
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| SFTP | Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| XMPP | Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #182 for this comm, first seen 21st Mar 2026, 16:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
do you already have monitoring solution for your vps? maybe prometheus/altermanager and the node_exporter?
otherwise i join the forgejo praise, and also enjoy etherpad (self hosted (limited) google doc)
how do you handle backups? recommendation: borg
No, so far I just hope nothing breaks :) will take a look!
With so many recommendations in this thread, Forgejo must be great. I've used it with Codeberg, but self-hosting seems a lot better (especially if they introduce federation at some point).
Thanks!