this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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Privacy

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I'm just mildly curious. I know this isn't the self hosting chan, but how many of you self host services as part of your efforts to retain your privacy, security, and anonymity?

I've been self hosting something for decades now. I got really started back in the PreNapster era. I ran an independent, selfhosted, fully licensed, internet radio outfit. That was back when music on the internet was a lot of cheap, tinny, geocities, midis. LOL I worked with a company called IM Radio Networks. They and Phillips, developed one of the world's first bookshelf stereo, that was internet ready. Hook it up to the internet, and you could listen to AM/FM and IM radio. I've often mused that if it weren't for Shawn Fanning, the music landscape on the internet might look a bit different as he forced the music industry to reevaluate how they did business.

Now, I self host a ton of stuff just for my own needs. It's an enjoyable, purposeful, hobby, that keeps me busy. It's also, so very educational, and I learn new things daily.

ETA: Man it does my heart good to meet and greet privacy minded users who also self host. It is an integral part of my privacy, anonymity, and security posture. If you aren't already, or are thinking of self hosting, do it! You don't need massive racks in the closet that dim the lights on reboot. A simple NUC or even RPi are quite capable of serving up services. You don't need a Tier 1 feed from your ISP. Keep it simple and basic and work up from there to meet your needs.

Thanks again to all those who responded and shared their experiences.

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[–] NedRyerson@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

NAS, Jellyfin/Plex, Copyparty (Google Drive replacement), Kiwix (Wikipedia), Joplin, Searxng, Ollama (LLM). Plus all the various searching tools, the maintenance tools, etc. I have pretty strong compartmentalization of my storage into separate media pools that all have their own RAID setups, plus an external backup.

It's a bit of work to get all set up, but I use docker compose and autoheal / watchtower to keep the services going. I use Caddy and my own domain to make the services I want available externally to my network.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

watchtower

Do you find that Watchtower sometimes screws up the update? I know I was plagued with that issue enough to drive me out to search the webs. OG Watchtower hasn't been updated in 2 years and shows no real sign of activity. I went searching for a fork:

https://watchtower.devcdn.net/

Haven't had any issues since.

[–] NedRyerson@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Thanks for that! I have struggled with watchtower from time to time, so knowing there is a good fork out there is great. I'll try it out.

[–] huquad@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I try to selfhost wherever possible. There are a few exceptions where it's not practical (email for example), so I prefer not Google/Apple/Microsoft when that happens. In those cases, I also like to diversify so any potential enshitification is less painful to resolve.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, email is my kryptonite. I've run a couple packages in the past, but it is tedious. I use a EU service called mailo.com. Small, little company but in business for 20 years. Not a lot of gee whiz bells and whistles. Pretty much mail and a calendar, which is really all I need. I do make use of email aliases a lot.

[–] nicgentile@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are very easy steps you can take here. It seems complicated, but there are tools for this and with a VPS/VDS, you can be up and running in under an hour if you are technically inclined. Moving to my own email, is by far, one of the best things I have done in my life.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It wasn't the running it as much as the blacklisting.

[–] nicgentile@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So there is a bit of work you need to do, but if you manage your server well, do DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc and then nip it in the bud when you get warnings, its very easy to manage. Its about responsibility. Bad actors exist, but careful operators prevail.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I might take a swing at it a few more times. That's kind of my modus operandi. Do it, screw it up, restart. #$@$@ Do it, it works! Write that shit down! LOL

[–] nicgentile@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

It took me 6 deploys to finally understand all the mechanisms. What I like about self-hosting and the open source mantra in general is that every failure is a lesson with field experience. So skills development and acquisition is fairly easy if you push for it and once you get it, its wash, rinse, repeat.

[–] suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I see ya bro.

[–] s3rvant@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

DNS, Jellyfin and game servers mostly; occasionally will tinker with other stuff but those are the ones that have lasted

[–] termaxima@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Self hosting looks interesting, but I'd generally rather keep things offline. Even as a software developer, I value simplicity, and most online "services" I find entirely superfluous ; self hosted or no.

Jellyfin ? How about a big external drive with movies on it, just plug it into your viewing device of choice.

Hosting my notes ? I take my notes on physical paper. (Loose sheets, because notebooks have the same scaling issues computer notes have. Sometimes I just want to splay everything out on the table and do big picture work. That's also why I only use one side of the sheet.)

Music streaming ? I dont even know if you can self host this one (probably yes) but I'd rather just copy the file over ; even a huge library doesn't take that much space.

Photos ? I just have folders on an encrypted drive, with some backups elsewhere. Though I guess Immich looks interesting...

Documents ? Okay, I should self-host this one. For now it's all local, on-disk (encrypted of course, there's no good reason not to), but it can be quite inconvenient if my only copy is at home on my desktop.

So no, I don't self-host yet, and when I do (hopefully soon) it will be only in a limited capacity ; mostly out of a convenience concern, privacy being a distant second.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Totally understandable

[–] Trent@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't know if I'd call myself a privacy pioneer but I self-host some stuff and share/trade services with a few friends.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I don’t know if I’d call myself a privacy pioneer

lol I just needed something for the alliteration. Rock on my brother.

[–] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I only p2p but I can't do much, NAS is so expensive in my country :(

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

In the early days, I selfhosted on an old raggedy laptop

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I've been procrastinating.

[–] q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've relied on a Wireguard VPN for remote access until recently, I'm now playing with Pangolin via a VPS. I question why I need public (private) access, but it seems cool to operate that way and allows family members easier access.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Pangolin

Pangolin covers a wide swath of implementations that you'd normally have to connect together to get the same coverage, all in one package. I use it on a test VPS.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.

I know a lot of people have 'concerns' about Cloudflare, but the Cloudflare Tunnel/ZeroTrust free tier works like a charm. You don't have to punch holes in your server to route services/ports, no exceptions in UFW or similar. No port forwarding or NAT concerns on your router/firewall. The only caveat is that you need a proper domain name which you can pick up at NamesCheap for less than $5 USD. Overlay Tailscale on your server, and Jack's a doughnut, Bob's your uncle.

There are alternatives to Cloudflare like Pinggy, ngrok, LcalXpose, Zrok, Localtunnel, localhost.run, serveo, Inlets, and Frp. ngrok seems to be the more popular of the options.

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[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I self-host my own Monero node and I self-host my password manager and my files

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Monero node

Hmm. I'm pretty confident in my defences but selfhosting passwords and financials keeps me awake at night. LOL

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[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I recently got the homelab going and plan on expanding to a few family members as well.

12 nodes (some new Epycs for encrypted memory, some centreon ewaste for cold storage and background tasks, and a few in-between) so far. All Harvester HCI and Rancher. I run game servers, Ollama, and NFS for storing my encrypted back ups on it mostly at the moment, with a sync to send encrypted to Proton for that off-site.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I can only get so erect

[–] muxika@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've been selfhosting for about 4 years now. I wanted to break away from services like Google and find tools I could control on my own hardware.

I went from bare-metal Jellyfin and Nextcloud on my NAS to running the NAS with an NFS share and a Raspberry Pi as a pod orchestrator through quadlets. That little sucker is running pods for:

  • media (audiobookshelf, kavita, Jellyfin)
  • Immich
  • Invidious
  • Navidrome
  • Peertube
  • SearXNG
  • Servarr suite (flareresolverr/jackett/prowlarr, gluetun/qbittorrent, jellyseerr, lazylibrarian, lidarr, mylar3, radarr, sonarr)

It's also running instances of:

  • mumble
  • nginx-proxy-manager
  • sftpgo
  • syncthing

I've only opened a few services for family usage, but everything else is VPN-accessible.

Also, no more Nextcloud. Syncthing balances everything out, and I can use sftpgo's webdav option to host my own seedvault backups. Now Google is collecting dust.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Invidious

I am keen to know how you keep Invidious operational? YT is on a killing spree to make it impossible to view videos unless you submit to their platforms. Ban hammering IPs happens constantly. I got frustrated and just use LibRedirect to access already established instances. I just don't want to jump through all the YT hoops, listen to back to back un-skipable ads just to find out the tutorial I thought I was interested in was crap.

[–] muxika@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I just have it in a pod with the companion app. They auto update and auto restart at night. I've also kept my subscriptions fairly low. Most of the time, that's all I need.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I self-host a decent bit of stuff. My setup has been to rent rack space in a datacenter to put my own storage server in, plus a second server at my house that I mirror backups between. I run my own VPN, "Cloud" storage, lemmy instance, game servers, websites, CI build systems, media streaming, etc... You can find some cheap server hardware on eBay that's only a generation or two old, which you'll need if you're running in a datacenter, but for home servers it's super easy to just set up an old desktop with a battery backup.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

CI build systems

I've always wanted to implement something like that.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a few different services you can use to set it up. I quite like Buildkite since they've got a pretty easy setup for running jobs on your own hardware, but I think several other CI services have a self-hosting option.

The best part about it for me is I can run GPU tests and do automatic screenshot diffs for my game engine. Normally renting a GPU server is super expensive, but it's basically free to run myself using my old hardware.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I quite like Buildkite

I put it on the list. Got to check it out.

[–] Core_of_Arden@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not a pioneer - but I selfhost.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Awesome bro. What kind of things do you selfhost?

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