cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426881
I’m not affiliated with this in any way but saw it posted at the other place & thought fellow Lemmyzens might like to take a look.
I always find it quite hard to answer “favorite” apps as some infrastructure critical self hosted apps aren’t as sexy as others which sit front & centre so I feel they often don’t seem to get as much credit or attention (such as NGinX/DuckDNS compared to Immich/Jellyfin etc)
Hi everyone,
Like in previous years, I’m running a survey about self-hosting. The focus is on your favorite self-hosted apps, but there are plenty of other (optional) questions too. The top five app lists are free response fields, you don’t have to select the suggestions.
Link to take the survey:
https://survey.deployn.de/s/self-host-2026
More info:
The survey is anonymous. Like last year, results will be published in aggregated form. I’m currently planning to publish them in December.
It takes about 10-25 minutes.
Some of you asked for more questions in the comments. I added a lot at first, then realized it took 45 minutes to fill out properly. So I threw some out again, but there are still quite a few. The survey now has a core section that mainly covers the MVPs (your 5 favorite apps), and you can switch on other modules if you want. Almost every question is optional and can be skipped. If you answer everything at a reasonable pace, it takes around 20 minutes.
The proprietary survey tool caused new problems every year, so last year I switched to HeyForm while the survey was already running. That wasn’t ideal for my purposes either, so this year the survey runs on a new app. It should also make entering your apps faster.
It’s still easier to fill out on a desktop computer.
Thank you in advance for participating.
Them that don’t pull in half a Gigabyte in dependencies. That’s all zombie code that waits to be exploited.
Yeah, I’m not using that. But I will answer the question.
My favorite thing to self host is still my Kiwix server (and increasingly - and begrudgingly XMPP. I tried really hard to get equivalent function out of IRC backend but it’s just too flakey for non tech folk).
Having off line wikipedia, books, fora etc still feels like magic to me. People think “oh, off line wikipedia. Yeah that’s cool” but the way ZIM files work to create snapshots of sites lets you curate your own stack (eg: I have Wikipedia mini no pic as the core but then indepth biology, astronomy, with substacks about movies, pop culture etc) is something else. To say nothing of ZIMMITing your own website snapshots. I’m currently requesting ERE and a few others.
I’m also coding a small bridge that constrains my local llm (miniCPM5-2B) to answer only from those trusted sources, properly (think, tool call constraints, grep over results, citing exact spans etc). MiniCPM5 is pretty dumb but excellent at tool calls and finding stuff and it doesn’t need a beefy GPU.
It’s actually quite nice to have your own “Google in a can” but you curate what goes into it. I can pull out my phone, “SMS” Chip (as the kids named it; it’s “brain” on my phone) and ask “what was that movie with Rhys Darby - the one where he was cosplaying as a Spartan?” and in a few minutes get a message back like “I searched local sources and it looks like Yes Man (2008) might be what you’re remembering. You’ve got that one in the library. Do you want me to go online to confirm or just start streaming it to the lounge room tv?”. That’s just nice for those brain fart moments.
The second thing I enjoy hosting is YouTube downloader. Right now, I’m figuring out a way to have downloaded video (with meta data etc) display as normal videos in SmartTube on all our TVs, with the effect being they intermingle with live videos…but if you pull the plug on the net, the self hosted vids (and thus, “YouTube” as far as the kids are concerned) still just works.
I’ve scoped out the project and I think I can get around 1500, 20+ min videos in around 1TB of drive space at 720p60, and a lot more at 480p. I’ve forked SmartTube and done the ground work; now I just need to Lego the pieces together.
I also enjoy the PiMaps thing I finished recently and I think WikiDocs is really cool.
I think basically I just like creating and hosting my own infra. Once I get to the point of “internet in a can” (yes, I know about project nomad), I’ll finish wiring it up to the solar [I’m really excited by that; I have a cool system specc’ed out] and then I’ll probably swing back around to playing with LoRa and ESP32s (I have an idea of making a ESP32 “phone” of sorts).
Everyone needs a hobby, eh?.
Done! Nice UI.
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: matrix (synapse), element web, casdoor, Plex, znc
Completed! Looking forward to seeing the results
What the hell is this AI slop?
This isn’t AI slop. This has been going on for a few years. They have last year’s results available.
It sucks that recently, if something is well formatted, we have to stop to question if its just LLM slop.
People don’t call things slop just by looking because they are well formatted, it is because they all look the same. The styling was very obviously done with the aid of a LLM.
It’s is vibe coded tho (just look at the UI) and I’m not sure what they do with the data in aggregate…so, I can see why people on !privacy might have some concerns about it.
I wouldn’t call it “coded in bad faith”, but folks on Lemmy (and here especially) are sensitive about this sort of thing.
I’m just cross-posting. I don’t think it’s slop at all, it was made with AI though, pretty sure.
