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.
Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: 6–10 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Proxmox VE, nixos-mailserver
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Actual Budget, Baikal, Memos, Termix, Jellyfin
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Immich, Nextcloud, dawarich, Home Assistant, PocketID
Top Motivation: CostThe several hundred dollars a year and hours spend is definitely worth saving that $14-30/month in subscriptions right? right?
Initial cost may be high. But I have calculated that my system. Would cost me 9 euros a month at 12tb of cloud storage. Something that I can’t achieve if I pay for cloud storage to a big man.
What brings me from clouds back to earth is current hard drives prices. Fuck AI.
Right, $14-30/m actually adds up to hundreds and is less reliable.
I know, I know super duper clouds, six nines of availability for cloud services etc., yet github (for example) fails more often then my media/git/file/print server on 10 y.o. laptop with tens of terabytes of media and data, that is less maintened and exists in a far worse conditions (comparison is incorrect but the fact stays).
$14-30/month in subscriptions is $168-360/year.
You likely spend more than that a year on what you host (I know my power alone is going to run higher than that), but the monetary cost doesn’t cover the joys of the hobby, the knowledge aquired, and the fact that your shit still works even after the Internet goes out
My wife spent about $130 for a year subscription to a service that she figured would always have her favorite show on it, because they own that show. Then like 10 seasons of it left for an exclusivity deal on another service. This was a contributing factor to pushing me into self hosting. Some of it is saving money, but some of it is also making sure you actually got what you paid for.
That’s $14 to $30 a month per subscription per user. I’ve got close to a dozen people using mine, most of which can very much not afford those kind of subscriptions.
Absolutely. I refuse to rely on cloud anything after being bitten too many times: company gets purchased, unstable pricing or service changes/discontinuation, data trapped in someone else’s server, internet or service instability… 100% self hosted is the safer, saner, more predictable option.
Getting labelled “AI pioneer” would feel like being called a slur
Eternal Tinkerer 🔧
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Cost savings, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: FreshRSS, Home Assistant, Radarr, Sonarr, Nginx Proxy Manager
I haven’t used an RSS in years, might have to look at that and start reading web comics again.
I recommend looking into rssbridge too! Its a companion that makes most websites rssable
So this rrsbridge lets you add website and then it feeds it to you as an rss stream? That sounds intersting. Mat have to look into it.
It pains me that new achewood is behind a paywall. I understand it, I can’t justify affording it.
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Sonarr, Pi-hole, Navidrome, Home Assistant
This survey is going to become our version of Spotify Wrapped isn’t it?
Reeks of Claude
AI Pioneer 🤖
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Gitea, Grafana, InfluxDB, LibreChat, Ollama
Lol, you suck
Why? Self Hosting AI is fine in my opinion
Where’s the training data from?
If you run Nemotron, from open datasets.
See the dataset table here. There are sections for pretraining and for specific tasks/topics, like STEM, code and such: https://huggingface.co/nvidia
Chinese models are starting to open their pretraining datasets too, albeit slowly.
Okay, but we know most don’t
Admittedly, no, but this is slowly improving. Stepfun published their SFT dataset, smaller labs are publishing their datasets for task specific tunes. I believe there was another Chinese lab that published bulk pretraining data, but I can’t find it in my history at the moment.
And, notably, these comparatively tiny labs generally aren’t scraping the internet so abusively like OpenAI/Meta. They don’t need as much. Going by statements in their papers, they tend to use existing archives of web data, buy commercial data, or (more recently) generate a lot synthetic data.
Ok thanks for telling me your reasoning. But… when i use a model which was built on pirated data and i am a pirate myself - i think its fine.
Wow. Harsh comment.
It’s not like your own post was full of details either
I can’t self host I’m not smart enough :-(
Don’t be so down on yourself mate, start with the Linux upskill challenge then look at some Docker YouTube tutorials. You will be there in no time.
Legitimate feedback for the survey.
Whether you think you are or aren’t smart enough, you’re right!
If you want to do it, read up and just try it. Throw a Linux install on an old desktop or laptop and try to follow a guide and make it work. It seems daunting, but most anyone can follow a guide and get to a usable product.
I’m not either but I still do it.
I didn’t know anything about self-hosting when I started either. There is a learning curve but it’s not difficult, just takes some time and is totally worth it to own your data, have a little more privacy and to stop shelling out money for subscriptions, etc. Totally worth it. I’ve been self hosting for almost 2 years now and have learned alot but still learning every day. Theres alot I still don’t know and still encounter issues at times but it doesn’t keep me from figuring it out and to keep self-hosting. Go for it, you won’t regret it.
I’m a year or so longer on my self-hosting journey than you, but also get humbled like a noob on a regular basis. I was a Linux user for over a decade when I first started self-hosting but I knew nothing about networking because I always lived places where someone else managed the internet. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I have a lot left to learn. It really does take time to get a comprehensive understanding of what you are doing and why, but the good news is you can learn a lot through osmosis and we are already doing it just by being here.
Exactly. I’m actually the opposite. I was a Windows user for years and years since the days of 3.1. When I started my self-hosting about 2 years ago, I switched my pc and server to Linux and have been using Linux fully now. Aside from Linux being better for self-hosting, I wanted to finally get away from the mess that Windows has become and the dirty crap Microsoft pulls now.
Did you have any exposure in Linux before eventually switching, or did you just step straight from the Windows world into the great Linux unknown?
Windows 3.1 has a bit of a fond spot in my heart. Even though we didn’t have 3.1 at home, the school computer lab used it. We used to scare the teacher by typing “dir stat” or something like that into the terminal to make the text scroll like we were hacking stuff in a movie 🤣 (she didn’t know anything about computers, just there to make sure we didn’t run off with them). I also recall those colorful all-in-one Macintosh computers making an appearance at a different school.
I had very little exposure and knowledge of Linux. Tried it years ago but it didn’t stick. So basically when I moved the PCs to it, it was pretty much jumping in and just going for it and learning. I chose OSes that still had a bit of a Windows feel so I didn’t feel completely lost. But, as mentioned before, still alot to learn using the terminal, etc.
Yeah, I miss the old Windows OSes and the way they were. Those were my very fun and nostalgiac days on a computer. Newer versions just aren’t good anymore. 🤣 ahhh yes, the Macs that were bright oranges and greens and reds lol, definitely remember using those in schools.
We are all learning and we all make mistakes. It’s part of the journey.
yunohost + ebay or old office desktop (or literally any computer you can get your hands on for cheap). There’s a lot of people with very strong opinions but you really don’t need much.
It’s a nice survey, but often forgets that you can also self-host in the cloud, and doesn’t even consider that rented root-servers exist.
Future Self-Hoster 🌱
- Next up: Jellyfin, Immich
Data Hoarder 💾
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Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
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Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
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My MVPs: Audiobookshelf, Arr stack broadly, Actual Budget, Self built utilities and custom code, Homedex
The survey led me to finding https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii , an anti-AI alternative to Actual Budget. Haven’t tried either. 🤷♂️
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Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Homepage, homelable.net, healthchecks.io, ntfy.sh, WireGuard
My fleet sounds bigger than it is since theyre all small or older and also small underpowered devices (repurposed laptops, low end chromebox, various pis).
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Immich, Navidrome, Dockhand, Proxmox VE, Caddy
