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

Last year’s results

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.

  • vilisseranen@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    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
  • Mike@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Self-Hoster 🏡

    • Fleet: 1 device · 1–4 TB
    • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings
    • My MVPs: Immich, Searxng, Vaultwarden, Radicale, Rclone
  • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Data Hoarder 💾

    • Fleet: 6–10 devices · More than 50 TB
    • Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
    • My MVPs: Immich, PeerTube, Ghost, Actual Budget, Home Assistant

    I create videos for YouTube/PeerTube and backup all of the raw footage. The actual storage count is currently 130TB in my main NAS with about 250TB for an offsite cold storage backup (as most of my data doesn’t change much) and on-site live-ish backup. I also have the benefit of being able to get reputable used commercial grade HDDs from work for $10/TB, even right now, it makes it way too easy. Shameless plug of my PeerTube instance: https://joeltube.com/ or @JoelKalich on YouTube.

    • Clutter@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Data Hoarder 💾

      • Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB

      • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting

      • My MVPs: Pangolin, Nextcloud, kubernetes, freshrss, Jellyfin

  • habitualTartare@lemmy.worldEnglish
    506·
    3 days ago

    Top Motivation: Cost

    The several hundred dollars a year and hours spend is definitely worth saving that $14-30/month in subscriptions right? right?

    • imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      22·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      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).

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      $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

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • anotherandrew@lemmy.mixdown.caEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • praxispotato@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    82·
    2 days ago

    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
          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            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.

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 day ago

                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.

          • loppwn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            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.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    A cynic might think this is all a data gathering exercise…and wonder why [AIP] isn’t needed for a pretty clearly vibe-coded site? 🫥

    Nah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

  • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    This survey definitely looks vibe-coded as heck lol but I hope the results will be good.

    My results :)

    Data Hoarder 💾

    • Fleet: 2–3 devices · More than 50 TB
    • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control
    • My MVPs: Immich, Baikal, Forgejo, qBitTorrent, Home Assistant

    God knows I wasn’t going to put cost as a motivation… I am actively losing money running double the storage I am using and 100+ GB of RAM on a Xeon chip, but having the headroom is certainly nice and has allowed me to expand as much as I want. Getting a good deal a couple of years back before the price explosion was a huge stroke of luck. If this server ever failed I could figure out a smaller operation with more confidence.

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Cost was one of my motivations, but it wasn’t cost to me. Most of the people using my server definitely can’t afford to subscribe to all those streaming services.

      • achsonaja@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Glad you mentioned that. A lot of folks are saying costs isn’t a good reason (for valid reasons), but I don’t think the other users costs are typically thought of. I don’t host to a lot of people, but they are active and use a few different services I host. That easily multiplies the cost savings imo.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Need is a strong word lol. I definitely don’t need as much as I’ve got as I only use 20-50GB on services (Docker and TrueNAS) with the rest being used as ZFS cache. I would not have bought this much normally but I got it as a package in a PC with an RTX 3080, Xeon Gold 6150, and the RAM for $1000 CAD (750 USD ish?). No way was I passing that up.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I tried it first and swapped away. I know I didn’t like how Radicale required editing text files to add accounts, that’s for sure, but the main reason I swapped was that the Docker environment kept freezing and using up 200% CPU until I manually restarted it. Rinse repeat every few hours. This was on a new install with 1 user. No issues since I moved to Baikal and the web UI is much nicer.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Actually, I use Baikal for contacts and Radicales for Calendars. It helps me keep everything well segregated.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Self-Hoster 🏡

    • Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
    • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
    • My MVPs: Radicale, Baikal, OPNSense, Home Assistant, AdGuard Home

  • champagne_laugh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Self-Hoster 🏡

    • Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
    • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
    • My MVPs: Immich, Home Assistant, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden, Navidrome
  • pandakhan@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Fleet Commander 🚀

    • Fleet: More than 10 devices · 21–50 TB
    • Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Fun / the hobby itself
    • My MVPs: Plex, swag, pihole, Navidrome

    I realized that I actually have just over 50TB now after replacing a failed hard drive. I’ve been using retired enterprise hardware and slowly replacing it all with stuff that is MUCH lower power consumption and I recently got a DGX Spark so I could work on some self-hosted ML work for physics modeling and helping me fix all the code I manage to break. (read: catch typos and formatting)

  • outerspace@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Homelab Veteran ⚡

    • Fleet: 2–3 devices · 1–4 TB
    • Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control, Fun / the hobby itself
    • My MVPs: Sonarr, Portainer, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden