What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.

Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.

Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!

  • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

    FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

    Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

    • CybranM@feddit.nuEnglish
      2·
      23 hours ago

      How difficult is it to set up FoundryVTT? I heard they changed some things recently but I’m very out of the loop

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        20 hours ago

        Depends on what part of “set up” you’re referring to. Getting the software itself up and running is extremely easy. They have versions available for the full swathe of experience levels from “here is a packaged Electron based Windows application” to “here are the node.js source files”. All prior versions are also available if you have specific needs for an earlier version.

        Now, if you mean how difficult is it to set up and run a game, that’s going to vary wildly depending on the system the game uses and how complex of a scenario whoever is running the game wants to deal with. There are lots of off-the-shelf one shots or campaigns you can run where that setup is already done for you though.

        • CybranM@feddit.nuEnglish
          1·
          19 hours ago

          Ah ok, I was mostly talking about hosting Foundry itself but that sounds promising if it’s relatively easy. I have some stuff set up but I’m very inexperienced when it comes to hosting etc