Selfhosted

Not exactly a "life changing experience", but using blocky instead of pihole or adguard. It's basically "the same thing" but with way more customization features -- and the "cherry on top" of setting it as user nobody instead of root or your current one.

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

A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee

If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!

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.

Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.

Home Assistant.

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 @[email protected]. 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.

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.

So, if you don't know yet what you're doing, I wouldn't host anything critical yet, but I'm using:

https://yunohost.org/

And so far, very few troubles. It's a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.

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.