A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (donβt cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Here's my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)
Hey it's more than good enough to run all this Β―_(γ)_/Β―
people put too much "lab" and not enough "home" in homelab. we need more dust, more cables, more jank. love this.
Dust and jank you say? Behold, my old basement homelab when I rented just outside Boston with a very permissive landlord who agreed to let me have Comcast gig pro fiber pulled into the basement, running off an outlet I installed without asking on a free slot in our breaker box. The dust was terrible, the rack was a hodge podge, I had to put up that sign because maintenance guys kept plugging their power tools into the UPS when I wasn't around and tripping it. But Comcast fucked up the billing and the 2gig + 1gig symmetric internet is still active to this day for free, which I left behind minimally working for the next tenants after parting out the rack. The tower by the side was a friend who wanted to colocate on my fiber, and I had some fun stuff like a slide out vga console. I also pulled Ethernet into every room, most of them installed with nice wall plates all bundled down to the rack, so with a house full of gamers, you could have multiple people pulling a gig on a game download without anyone stepping on anyone else's toes.
Dang that's the dream. Never move out :D
This is the best thread so far. Really enjoying seeing peoples setups! Thanks @northernlights@lemmy.today !
more dust
Believe it or not I cleaned before taking the pic lol
I had a dusty laptop running a homelab for you, and figured I should show something nice on the screen. Then, I typed in my password like an idiot. Not gonna put that online. :(
That desk is about a million times cleaner than mine.
So clean, I'm jealous
Oi thats too clean for this thread. Get out of here! /s Nice setup.
I remember looking at Sysracks racks a while back when I was trying to find sound-absorbent enclosed racks (which they do make, though I didn't get one; wasn't willing to pay for it, as they come at a very large premium). They were one of the very few companies making them. I don't think that those particular ones are the sound-absorbent models, but their name stuck in my head.
I was too lazy to put on clothes and go out to my shack. This picture is a bit old. It's missing a lot of mess and my PeerTube server.
Is the UPS between quotes just a fancy power hub? I mean that would work, that's smart.
Yea, it's a power station with built-in UPS. https://iallpowers.eu/products/allpowers-r600-portable-power-station-600w-299wh-with-lifep04-battery-1
The white box at the wall is also a battery from my solar setup, with an ATS. So kinda double UPS π€
I want one! Ive been thinking of setting up one with solar since my area gets next to no rain and hot as hell. Might as well use that to my advantage!
Oh neat! is that where peertube.wtf is also hosted?
so, that's where lemmy.wtf lives
Projects that im running:
Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.
Solar powered web server. Its going to be repurposed into a meshtastic node soon.
Somewhat jank setup of a heltek which is also an ebook reader. It runs a webserver to upload the book in txt format, then I can take it on the go. I still have to do some work on the text.
Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.
If you get bored and adventurous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws
Computer case screws are the hardware used to secure parts of a PC to the case. Although there are numerous manufacturers of computer cases, they have generally used three thread sizes.
The #6-32 UNC screws are often found on 3.5" hard disk drives and the case's body to secure the covers. The M3 threaded holes are often found on 5.25" optical disc drives, 3.5" floppy drives, and 2.5" drives. Motherboards and other circuit boards often use a #6-32 UNC standoff. #4-40 UNC thumb screws are often found on the ends of DVI, VGA, serial and parallel connectors.
You might be able to get a box of thumbscrews in the appropriate diameter and go toolless. I've had a number of computer cases that ship with those (my current desktop case just uses magnets, doesn't even have the thumbscrews). I have had a lot of less-than-ideal toolless things in the past, including poorly-designed toolless hard drive mounting stuff that wound up being a lot more work than the traditional tool-requiring stuff, but for the screws that keep the case closed, going toolless has always been a big win for me.
Thats good to know! Although if I am honest, ill probably just repurpose my current desktop that I am using for this conversation and get a new one if I end up re-doing my homeservers again.
Last thing I want to do is more work at home. So these are just "for fun" projects. If im not having fun, I start removing things from the setup.
That ebook reader is wild! Does the text stay in place while you read, or does it scroll past like a stock ticker?
If the latter doesn't exist, I guess I should go push a PR to make that happen on meshcore firmware haha
Stays in place. It was a weekend project so I still need to do some work on the text in particular. Im not sure if ill go any farther, but the code is here if you want to take a look.
Okay I'll bite.
hell yeah.
Dang so very jealous. When I finally get a job i'm so building a little datacenter in my walk-in closet :D
My little Raspberry Pi 5 with an old 1tb Hard drive connected to a WiFi extender. It ain't much but I like it.
I used to work in automation as an electrician so I'm all about those coils and curves.
the hardrive just out in the wild, living life like it was meant to be lived.
What are its natural predators?
gravity
beverages
drunk sysadmins
Spill your beer on it and get all three in one go!
Is that usb mounted??
Nothing fancy myself as well. Not unemployed but I don't necessarily wanna spend a lot on something I'm really just cutting my teeth with so far.
The central hub is up top, a Bosgame P4 Mini with 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe and a decent last-last gen Ryzen 7. It's enough to run Jellyfin, HA, and PiHole all through Proxmox. Been rock solid outside of a planned power outage Peco was doing (and actually did it this time!)
I also have Jellyfin connected to an 8TB RAID1 NAS that resides upstairs in our shared space, and HA connected to the basement tech, mostly lighting and the TV and PC.
Bonus battlestation pic (not really lol)
nice
Did someone ask for jank, dust, and cables?
This looks like an after-work special. Nice setup. That APC is awesome. I need to get a new one.
Hey, shock-absorbing floor, stable structure to put the servers on, and a UPS. I bet that's much better than the vast majority of us (1st thing I buy when I get a job is a UPS).
The home server under my desk. Very professional, as you can see.
Oooh that's neat.
Dust and jank, you say?
Classic blue 5-port gigabit switch. Chef's kiss!
These things will be with us until the heat death of the universe. Still chugging along.
Hard-drives deserve to be free to their cases! Free the drives!
Β―_(γ)_/Β―
You want a double-backslash in Markdown.
Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
yields
Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Whereas:
Β―\\_(γ)_/Β―
yields
Β―\(γ)/Β―
Indeed, I really should have caught that.
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 |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| IoT | Internet of Things for device controllers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #223 for this comm, first seen 8th Apr 2026, 20:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Whatβs that web interface thing? Is it home made? I keep thinking about doing something like that to save me having to remember port numbers for the different services on my home server.
It's just heimdall, behind haproxy (on the raspberrypi) so everything is on the same domain (and behind cloudflare because i'm a madman who exposes stuff publically)