Submitted 5 weeks ago by muxika@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
I’m a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
Linux - the gateway drug.
Its gotta be the sox.
I was going to think up something more elaborate, but this is enough.
I’m also a bit of an electronics hoarder recycler, which probably got me into Linux in the first place. And Linux proved me right: old hardware is still good. My first server was a 32 bit laptop.
I also work in the social sector btw. and Linux, self-hosting etc. have aspects that fit in well with that.
That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.
I still have a means of booting up Windows if there’s a need (usually for a firmware flash too that doesn’t have a Linux alternative).
I was dual booting with Windows ME (which worked well for my computer). Distro hopping until I bootstrapped Gentoo from stage one.
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
as a student, this is much more interesting than studying
As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.
I once wired my whole ass house for ethernet. (Before realizing I was colorblind nonetheless.) Instead of studying.
Never underestimate how you can use study procrastination as a push force for other shit. (Unless you’re a dipshit like me and do it with an imminent exam)
As a cyber student, I have to literally stop myself from researching FOSS apps and homelab setups so I do my actual work that will get me the degree to pay for said projects and setups…
Hey, hosting your own LLM could work out for you in that respect.
i’d rather spend time actually learning and doing things instead of being an LLM slopper lol
@muxika @hexagonwin If you do make sure you got a gpu or you'd likely be frustrated with it if it worked.
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all mt spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there’s a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it’s text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it’s not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it’s only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
sad OSCAR noises
Piracy, basically.
Self-hosting wasn’t my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.
Piracy, basically.
Lol, you don’t say? Do you use something like Jellyseerr for requests?
Nah.
Piracy was just my gateway.
I dont have a media server anymore.
I’ve been a media hoarder for decades, my partner is an avid dvd collector. I used to have lofty goals with friends about setting up our own server and media centers so we didn’t have to afford the world we live in. The friends fell off along the way, but I finally managed to make the dream happen. It’s bittersweet that I don’t really have anyone to celebrate it with.
Sorry to hear. On the upside, no one will be upset when the server goes down.
That’s true. Honestly I think it’s fine this way, I just wish I could send out little updates, take requests and stuff. Day to day operations is my love language and not having a valid reason to make an RSS feed or newsletter is just a reminder that I don’t have a community anymore.
The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.
Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.
Dude, yes! Subscriptions are a scam. They hold your downloads at ransom.
Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.
I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica’s black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that’s like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you’re downloading our music on Napster, then we don’t want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find “alternative methods” for every piece of digital media I could, if that’s how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.
I still download and share all of Metallica’s discography out of spite, but haven’t listened to them since.
I love your origin story so much
Engineer here
What division? Curious. I’m a mech eng specializing in HVAC. I didn’t get to attain my own PE stamp…life happened.
I do civil engineering work, mostly related to soils etc. I have a computer for work but that’s about as far as it gets for me professionally.
-Cable is insanity. It’s companies are corrupt and awful.
-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?
-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.
Lemmy has been a big part of it.
I’ve never been fond of paying big tech to spy on me. It has been getting gradually more expensive and more intrusive for years. Around the time I reached a breaking point, folks here helped me realize that digital sovereignty is possible.
One day I was just like, “Why does Google need to know when my lightswich is on?” And that was the start of it.
I fucking hate tech companies
I’m an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any ‘junk’ they wanted to get rid of. I’d load up my wagon and back to the house I’d go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.
I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests…until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.
My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I’ve had just about one of each since then.
Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real ‘self hosting’ gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that’s about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.
From there, I’ve been selfhosting something or another but it didn’t start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.
The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.
HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.
Out of all services I run, my wife has as registered user on 3 of them, which are Immich, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. She basically uses only Immich cause it fucking rocks and she loves it!
Well… I bought a Philips hue starter set. And I had heard of mqtt and zigbee. And I had a spare raspberry pi.
Now that got out of hand and I am looking at a proxmox cluster….
😁 There’s a game called Factorio you might like.
Former English teacher here. My self-hosting origin is that I had 20 years or so of teaching materials I’d collected in OneNote over that time and simply wanted to have offline copies so that I could feel that if ever something went wrong with Microsoft like getting permanently locked out of my account, then I had a means of restoring everything. Microsoft makes it practically impossible to export to a working backup.
After spending a LONG time trying everything to get back ownership of my materials, I understood the need to move my digital stuff away from big tech. I bought a Synology NAS, learned how to use Docker and then took more steps. About the same time I started using Fediverse apps and learned a great deal from the discussions and links there. My greatest “learn” has been keeping notes in plaintext files (and not getting seduced by nice shiny new apps that are actually horrors that want lure you into a future subscription).
I use Obsidian as a OneNote replacement because it’s built around markdown, which is just a a text file that includes structure and formatting.
I don’t use their subscription syncing service, just sync files to my own phone and server. Obsidian is great for organizing, but I can still read all the files as text.
…get back ownership of my materials…
Yes, that was a red flag for me. Ever have your materials “removed?” I once lost a few Kindle books because Amazon pulled them off the shelves. After that, I learned how to strip DRM off the books and save them offline.
Ditto about the notes. Are you using any specific apps to edit them? I’m just using nvim with markdown plugins.
That’s one of the other big issues. I have the same worries about how digital-only gaming has become. My kids seem to prefer digital downloads and really don’t believe me when I warn them that they have absolutely no control over what they “buy”. But they look at me like one of those crazy old-timers who just doesn’t understand the modern world.
I started with Logseq and then quickly moved to Obsidian (which I think is great). Over the last couple of months I’ve started using Emacs with Org (partly for the challenge and partly because it seems to be able to do pretty much everything).
The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.
I’m a bum!
A 21st century bum with a bindle full of salvaged ram?
I currently grow weed, train dogs, and build custom computers. The last one has become all but impossible though. Dunno what you’d call me.
I currently grow weed
Cannabis will grow just about anywhere. However, to make it do magic, it takes skill.
I’m an accountant and tax professional but have always been into computers. I had a social media account breached although it was no issue as hadn’t used it did years. I used a terrible password as thought it did not matter but made me realise I needed to be better generally so started using a password manager.
Then Netflix stopped account sharing. I had just got a 4k TV and only their top level with 4 screens supported it so was pissed off. The fragmentation across services had started so was getting annoyed anyway. This led me to the arr’s.
I decided I could no longer trust Microsoft and hated their pricing structure so was interested in Nextcloud. By then I found the self hosted community (on reddit), bought a desktop PC and after getting the hang of it plus many mistakes I loved my services so will never look back.
Joined the migration to Lemmy. Am based in the UK and joined the anti-US feelings so am setting up more storage, better redundancy and more services for my family. A few family members are interested in helping so can share backups.
This feels like the road I took. Subscription services are a scam, and I can’t trust sharing personal data on somebody else’s hardware. Eventually I’d like to host instances for federated services I already use.
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
“I work in advertising” is an amazing signoff for this post. It works on so many levels, and I remain genuinely unsure which you intended. The bitter sarcasm of a veteran who saw this coming by virtue of having caused it? The smooth flex of a consummate professional? A stunning lack of self-awareness combined with simple earnest participation in the thread? In any case, thank you for making me stop and think :)
The bitter sarcasm of a veteran who saw this coming by virtue of having caused it?
a bit of this. Although in my defense, I wasnt working in advertising at the time (my company didnt even have an advertising division)
also, i dont work for one of the big tech companies that have their claws in your digital life. But i can see how it contributes at some level, however minor.
Same here, got locked out of my main gmail/google account and there was no real person to help me recover 10+ years of my stuff. Never again.
I’ve always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It’s so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.
I’m a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I’ve always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.
And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz
I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?
I was paying for netflix, spotify, cloud storage, shared calendar software, the works. I’ve since moved my media watching to jellyfin, music to navidrome, storage to my server w/ offsite backups of critical files, baikal + open source calendar solutions. Anything I can replace with something I run myself, I do. And I’m always adding more. If you don’t count the fact that I keep expanding the scope of my setup and buying hardware, I save lots per month in subs of various kinds
My background is in graphic design/marketing and I’ve mostly worked in the non-profit sector. A few years ago I canceled my Spotify subscription after they hiked up the prices and decided I wanted a way to stream my own music collection from anywhere. I found Navidrone, began learning docker, fell down the Jellyfin/arr rabbit hole, and eventually stumbled upon Cosmos Server as a simpler way to expose my containers safely. It’s been a fun project and a welcoming community so far.
Cosmos
Bravo! I deployed it on a test server just to how it was. Nice UI, great features as I remember. Seemed like a solid product. It’s got a well stocked app store.
Bravo! CosmOS does look pretty nice. If I had better hardware, I might try something like that. Right now I’m using Fedora Server because of the SELinux, copilot, and podman support out of the box.
I’ve noticed that, too, about the community. I think part of the reason for the friendliness is a desire to see the community grow. Self-hosting feels very grassroots.
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjo…
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.
I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn’t want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don’t have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora’s box was open.
Android phone and Own tracks.
As a kid, dad set me up on one of his spare dos/win3.1 PCs when he was working. The passion and learning never stopped from that point. Just not something I want to make a career of.
Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it’s been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.
My first interest was in running Unix for uucp Usenet, early 1980s. Never happened since I was poor, so it took DSL availability some 20+ years ago to run a Debian server at home. Around 1997 I ran my own Linux box on a university network, which ran a web server.
R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.
Privacy and ownership
Willoughby@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
I’m a mechanic.
This is both my reason and explanation lol.
I do my own work has been said to be taken a bit too literally in my case. I got ripped off by Geek Squad when I was 18 and said “wow, it’s just like getting ripped off at a shitty mechanic shop” and ever since then it’s been all hands-on.
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 5 weeks ago
I’m a web developer and whenever I pay my (awesome) mechanic I always sometimes wonder what it’s like on the “other side.”My dad was a mechanic when I was a child and I always regret never picking up those skills.
A lot of times when they run me through their problem-solving I’m like “damn, that’s just like reproducing a bug to find its root cause.”
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Never too late
Willoughby@piefed.world 5 weeks ago
Yes, but also factor in information in the mechanic space has no FOSS comparison. Some companies put out their official service manuals after a period of time but most charge your company out the ass to let you view everything in some proprietary walled garden. Troubleshooting a mechanical fault can be very similar to troubleshooting code or software, and sometimes it literally is a vehicle’s software, and out comes a laptop.
“What field am I in, again?”
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I quit IT work to be a mechanic. It’s exactly the same problem-solving process, but the problems are almost always way less arcane. I’m very happy with the switch.
If you wanted to make the switch yourself, the skill sets are very interchangeable. You’re just debugging an alternator instead of an Active Directory setup. If you have a willingness to learn you’ll be up to speed in under a year.
nathan@lemmy.permisuan.com 5 weeks ago
I’m also a mechanic, I self host for basically the same reasons and I just don’t like the idea of big tech spying on me . Definitely a lot of MAGA, it’s fucking annoying hahaha.
muxika@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I guess that allure of rugged individualism attracts a lot of MAGA types to trades and small businesses. It’s been the opposite in education on the teachers’ side, but definitely adversarial with MAGA on the students’ and parents’ side. I used to teach current events, but I haven’t been able to do that for the last 10 years. Kids would find their way into your personal accounts, too, so I switched to federated platforms instead.