If you are not in a tech field, what got you into self-hosting?
from muxika@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 12 Feb 02:27
https://lemmy.world/post/43032201
from muxika@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 12 Feb 02:27
https://lemmy.world/post/43032201
I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
threaded - newest
I’m a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
Linux - the gateway drug.
Its gotta be the sox.
That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.
I still have a means of booting up Windows if there’s a need (usually for a firmware flash too that doesn’t have a Linux alternative).
I was dual booting with Windows ME (which worked well for my computer). Distro hopping until I bootstrapped Gentoo from stage one.
I was going to think up something more elaborate, but this is enough.
I’m also a bit of an electronics
hoarderrecycler, which probably got me into Linux in the first place. And Linux proved me right: old hardware is still good. My first server was a 32 bit laptop.I also work in the social sector btw.
I’ve been a media hoarder for decades, my partner is an avid dvd collector. I used to have lofty goals with friends about setting up our own server and media centers so we didn’t have to afford the world we live in. The friends fell off along the way, but I finally managed to make the dream happen. It’s bittersweet that I don’t really have anyone to celebrate it with.
Sorry to hear. On the upside, no one will be upset when the server goes down.
That’s true. Honestly I think it’s fine this way, I just wish I could send out little updates, take requests and stuff. Day to day operations is my love language and not having a valid reason to make an RSS feed or newsletter is just a reminder that I don’t have a community anymore.
“If you build it they will come”
I would love to get your newsletter!
Any chance you’re looking for a free jellyfin with a surplus of weird movies and music? It’s not fast, but it’s free!
Heck yeah! Where do I sign?
As a kid, dad set me up on one of his spare dos/win3.1 PCs when he was working. The passion and learning never stopped from that point. Just not something I want to make a career of.
Yeah, there’s always a child-like fascination with technology. Do you ever feel like making it a career would’ve taken the joy out of it? My bro is IT and it somewhat did for him.
Oh absolutely! I tried to make a career of an interest once before and it killed my passion for it. I would be devastated if that happened with my tech love.
as a student, this is much more interesting than studying
As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.
Hey, hosting your own LLM could work out for you in that respect.
@muxika @hexagonwin If you do make sure you got a gpu or you'd likely be frustrated with it if it worked.
i’d rather spend time actually learning and doing things instead of being an LLM slopper lol
One. Of. Us!
Damn, got shot down, lol. I’m not advocating for churning out assignments; just for tinkering with editing and brainstorming. “Actually learning and doing things” is admirable. I’d rather be certain a student is growing instead of the clanker.
gigachad student
But think about it: You could outsource procrastinating to it and just do other things instead - like herding puppies…
What I’ve found works well is giving it a prompt to turn it into a tutor (along with giving it the information) if something doesn’t seem right, look into it without AI, I haven’t had it backfire on me yet. I can definitely respect someone avoiding ai entirely though.
I once wired my whole ass house for ethernet. (Before realizing I was colorblind nonetheless.) Instead of studying.
Never underestimate how you can use study procrastination as a push force for other shit. (Unless you’re a dipshit like me and do it with an imminent exam)
I’m a mechanic.
This is both my reason and explanation lol.
I do my own work has been said to be taken a bit too literally in my case. I got ripped off by Geek Squad when I was 18 and said “wow, it’s just like getting ripped off at a shitty mechanic shop” and ever since then it’s been all hands-on.
I sat on that fence but being a mechanic gives me guaranteed work and I basically work-out every day. It’s hard, but not brutal and the pay is decent. Surrounded by maga tho.
I’m a web developer and whenever I see my (awesome) mechanic I always wonder what it’s like on the “other side.”My dad was a mechanic when I was a child and I always regret never picking up those skills.
A lot of times when they run me through their problem-solving I’m like “damn, that’s just like reproducing a bug to find its root cause.”
Yes, but also factor in information in the mechanic space has no FOSS comparison. Some companies put out their official service manuals after a period of time but most charge your company out the ass to let you view everything in some proprietary walled garden. Troubleshooting a mechanical fault can be very similar to troubleshooting code or software, and sometimes it literally is a vehicle’s software, and out comes a laptop.
“What field am I in, again?”
charm.li at least there’s a piracy comparison. Closest thing to FOSS are the (sometimes quite good) walkthroughs of different projects you find on owners forums. I don’t know shit about nothin, but built myself both a decent car and server from other people’s junk
Never too late
I’m also a mechanic, I self host for basically the same reasons and I just don’t like the idea of big tech spying on me . Definitely a lot of MAGA, it’s fucking annoying hahaha.
I guess that allure of rugged individualism attracts a lot of MAGA types to trades and small businesses. It’s been the opposite in education on the teachers’ side, but definitely adversarial with MAGA on the students’ and parents’ side. I used to teach current events, but I haven’t been able to do that for the last 10 years. Kids would find their way into your personal accounts, too, so I switched to federated platforms instead.
Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.
Mostly gaming. I self-host three different game servers (Palworld, Minecraft and Terraria on occasion) and will be adding a TeamSpeak server soon to replace discord. Is it the best? Prolly not, but audio chat is all we really use Discord for anyway so we don’t need the full feature stack.
I’ve been trying to get the boys off discord for years, and am finally getting some traction with the whole age verification thing. Sticking point is they want screen sharing, any ideas?
Teamspeak 6 is in beta right now, but does have screen sharing. I don’t know how stable everything is atm, but might be worth looking into and keeping an eye on.
If the pricing model remains the same, we can expect TS6 to have a free self-hostable server for up to 32 users (which is the beta licensing right now).
I don’t know of any FOSS programs that have it, but I’m sure you can ask around and find one.
Yeah, in the asking around/trying stuff out phase now. movim.eu is the frontrunner, TS6 and a bunch of Element Call improvements for Matrix are apparently just around the corner. Matrix is my best guess for where things are headed and the smart move would be waiting for it to mature juuust a little, but I want to act while I’ve got their attention and that means having something up and running by the time Discord asks them for an id
Lemmy has been a big part of it.
I’ve never been fond of paying big tech to spy on me. It has been getting gradually more expensive and more intrusive for years. Around the time I reached a breaking point, folks here helped me realize that digital sovereignty is possible.
One day I was just like, “Why does Google need to know when my lightswich is on?” And that was the start of it.
I didn’t want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc… And that’s also how I ended up with a career in IT.
I got laid off and needed something to do.
I’m a teacher too. Started feeling burnt out a few years ago and considered a career change to tech. Didn’t make the jump but did gain a new hobby and a love for privacy, owning my own things, and happy blinking lights in a rack. Still not as jazzed about teaching as I used to be, but making time to work on projects that have clear, achievable goals has been good for me.
I did make the jump… into unemployment. But still much happier. I love teaching and would join an authentic, child-centred school at the drop of a hat - but not willing to be complicit in the toxic horror show that’s current UK education.
I’m not in a tech field now, but I used to be. I jumped ship when everything started moving to ‘cloud based’ because I don’t trust anything I can’t kick when it breaks.
Linux initially, giving way for me to see that the best alternatives to me are generally the ones I control.
And considering geopolitics, where I can see how dangerous a well-positioned spy/saboteur/paid actor can be, my next self host project is some ActivityPub social media, at least as an one-user instance since I don't want to act as a company yet, so I have control of where I'm posting from too.
-Cable is insanity. It’s companies are corrupt and awful.
-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?
-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.
I’m an industrial engineer who was hanging out on lemmy and my IT guy was talking about his piracy server, and well I thought that a legitimately aquired media server might be nice, and that home assistant thing sounded cool so he gave me the form to get two used desktops for free from the company. And well now I’m still fucking around with them every once in a while in anticipation for when my space will warrant actually using them full time.
It also helps that my local bdsm community had had self hosters who talked about it for years.
I’ll have to admit, that is one of the most unique statements I’ve heard at Lemmy.
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
Privacy and ownership
hating the anti-christ
… Microsoft?
Well… I bought a Philips hue starter set. And I had heard of mqtt, zigbee and pihole. And I had a spare raspberry pi.
Now that got out of hand and I am looking at a proxmox cluster….
😁 There’s a game called Factorio you might like.
I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?
I was paying for netflix, spotify, cloud storage, shared calendar software, the works. I’ve since moved my media watching to jellyfin, music to navidrome, storage to my server w/ offsite backups of critical files, baikal + open source calendar solutions. Anything I can replace with something I run myself, I do. And I’m always adding more. If you don’t count the fact that I keep expanding the scope of my setup and buying hardware, I save lots per month in subs of various kinds
Aah, I did not consider Netflix & Spotify. yeah that makes sense. I never paid for those either. But of course you can only self-host media if you first get it from somewhere*.
I do wonder who takes money separately/only for calendar hosting.
But yeah, all in all that amounts to a lot, and considering you can have a VPS with decent storage for under €10/mo. - it’s really the best solution.
I went for the full meal deal after getting some practice in, home server + raid array
Piracy, basically.
Self-hosting wasn’t my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.
Lol, you don’t say? Do you use something like Jellyseerr for requests?
Nah.
Piracy was just my gateway.
I dont have a media server anymore.
I couldn’t think about leaving my personal data to the Big Tech…
I’ve always been kinda technically motivated. The only reason I didn’t actually study computer science is that I had a great math teacher who made me fall in love with math. But I had it for a minor, and like to read stuff up from time to time. So, I guess I’m kinda in the grey area in regards to being a person in tech.
Anyway, I love tinkering with stuff, so I inevitably got into self hosting. Nowadays, I’ve even started maintaining some self hosted software.
The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.
Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.
Dude, yes! Subscriptions are a scam. They hold your downloads at ransom.
Besides privacy also moral reasons, using megacorps services means giving them money/power/data which in turn helps them do all the direct & indirect evils they do & influence (from exploiting monopolies & influencing demand side, to lobbying for lower taxes & legislature to keep/increase their monopoly, even just blankly supporting fascists political options bcs that has a great chance to enrich their shareholder value regardless of all the other effects, etc).
You know, try to leave a better place than you got it & whatnot.
Former English teacher here. My self-hosting origin is that I had 20 years or so of teaching materials I’d collected in OneNote over that time and simply wanted to have offline copies so that I could feel that if ever something went wrong with Microsoft like getting permanently locked out of my account, then I had a means of restoring everything. Microsoft makes it practically impossible to export to a working backup.
After spending a LONG time trying everything to get back ownership of my materials, I understood the need to move my digital stuff away from big tech. I bought a Synology NAS, learned how to use Docker and then took more steps. About the same time I started using Fediverse apps and learned a great deal from the discussions and links there. My greatest “learn” has been keeping notes in plaintext files (and not getting seduced by nice shiny new apps that are actually horrors that want lure you into a future subscription).
Yes, that was a red flag for me. Ever have your materials “removed?” I once lost a few Kindle books because Amazon pulled them off the shelves. After that, I learned how to strip DRM off the books and save them offline.
Ditto about the notes. Are you using any specific apps to edit them? I’m just using nvim with markdown plugins.
I use Obsidian as a OneNote replacement because it’s built around markdown, which is just a a text file that includes structure and formatting.
I don’t use their subscription syncing service, just sync files to my own phone and server. Obsidian is great for organizing, but I can still read all the files as text.
The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.
HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.
Out of all services I run, my wife has as registered user on 3 of them, which are Immich, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. She basically uses only Immich cause it fucking rocks and she loves it!
R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.
Liking computers in general and switching to Linux at 15 out of desperation.
After that all it took was getting an shitbox pc as a hand me down to make me go “Linux is also used on servers right? Shouldn’t be too difficult to setup something.” And that’s how I got the bug.
I’m an accountant and tax professional but have always been into computers. I had a social media account breached although it was no issue as hadn’t used it did years. I used a terrible password as thought it did not matter but made me realise I needed to be better generally so started using a password manager.
Then Netflix stopped account sharing. I had just got a 4k TV and only their top level with 4 screens supported it so was pissed off. The fragmentation across services had started so was getting annoyed anyway. This led me to the arr’s.
I decided I could no longer trust Microsoft and hated their pricing structure so was interested in Nextcloud. By then I found the self hosted community (on reddit), bought a desktop PC and after getting the hang of it plus many mistakes I loved my services so will never look back.
Joined the migration to Lemmy. Am based in the UK and joined the anti-US feelings so am setting up more storage, better redundancy and more services for my family. A few family members are interested in helping so can share backups.
This feels like the road I took. Subscription services are a scam, and I can’t trust sharing personal data on somebody else’s hardware. Eventually I’d like to host instances for federated services I already use.
My first interest was in running Unix for uucp Usenet, early 1980s. Never happened since I was poor, so it took DSL availability some 20+ years ago to run a Debian server at home. Around 1997 I ran my own Linux box on a university network, which ran a web server.
I’m an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any ‘junk’ they wanted to get rid of. I’d load up my wagon and back to the house I’d go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.
I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests…until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.
My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I’ve had just about one of each since then.
Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real ‘self hosting’ gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that’s about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.
From there, I’ve been selfhosting something or another but it didn’t start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.
By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.
I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn’t want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don’t have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora’s box was open.
Ooh, that is very cool! Do you think an rPi Zero could run Traccar? Mine is just collecting dust after I pulled it off my network because it couldn’t handle pihole traffic.
With a zero specifically I think you’d need extra bits to get it on a network, but Traccar itself is pretty lightweight.
Android phone and Own tracks.
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there’s a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it’s text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it’s not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it’s only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
I’ve always had a thing for tech. I used to make my own custom MySpace profiles, and pet pages on NeoPets, apply custom cursors to my PC, handled stuff when thr computer got viruses; all the stuff you’d expect of a 10 year old with an unrestricted internet access, and a love for technology. I did go to college for networking, but didn’t finish, and ended up in an unrelated field (won’t name here to avoid doxing myself, but I’m not even allowed to troubleshoot any tech to emphasize how unrelated this is).
I did kinda… Completely drop off for a while, but the thing that got me back was my most recent anti-Microsoft kick. Completely dropped Win10 (I’d usually had a windows and Linux machine at all times), dropped Google as my email, started using omg.lol for a lot of things, etc. Then I went half-in on a computer to use as a DNS-wide adblocker, and noticed that I could do… A lot more with it, and I like to tinker, so why not do a lot more with it? 2 years later, and it’s still the best $100 I’ve ever spent tbh.
The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.
I’m a bum!
A 21st century bum with a bindle full of salvaged ram?
Now Playing: Bad Religion - 21st Century Digital Bum
I currently grow weed, train dogs, and build custom computers. The last one has become all but impossible though. Dunno what you’d call me.
Cannabis will grow just about anywhere. However, to make it do magic, it takes skill.
It’s just fancy/finicky tomatoes, when you get down to it. Lol. The “skill” is owning a moisture and pH meter, and reading the soil/ hydroponic pH a couple times a day. I’ve all but automated the process at this point, at least from clone to bud stages. Getting clones to root, and trimming the buds is basically all I have to monitor any more, but that did take like 3 years of tweaking to setup.
Oh, and I grow indoors. My grow rooms could easily be used as electronics clean rooms without much modification. I set them up that way to keep out insects. Specifically spider mites. Needless to say, I can also control the temperature, humidity, and lighting of those rooms.
I grow a few tomatoes myself. Not quite the operation you have going tho. After doing a significant amount of research, I have found that is does great for my seizure condition. One of the terpines of cannabis is Linalool, and it is an effective anti-seizure med. So, I grow strains that are high in Linalool. After a seizure, it makes for a better rescue med than Ativan. In all honesty, tho I think cannabis gets over hyped a lot, it has made a demonstrable positive difference in my life. It isn’t a panacea drug, but is definitely has many medical use cases. It’s a shame here in the US that rich, white, racist, capitalist’s legislation from 100 years ago, still bogs down it’s legalization.
The military. Being on a ship with no wifi for months on end sort of makes you invest in entertainment that can go off grid. It started with a 3TB hard drive and what amounts to a NAS for hooking up to a computer screen or TV. I then moved to using Plex for streaming and the interface. Eventually I moved to Jellyfin.
At this point I just have a server in my living room with 10TB's worth of drives and the ability to share just about anything locally or wirelessly when I'm outside my house.
My job is technical but not... IT, cyber security, or development related. I've always been interested in computers though and have built several at this point.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #87 for this comm, first seen 12th Feb 2026, 16:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjo…
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.
I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica’s black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that’s like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you’re downloading our music on Napster, then we don’t want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find “alternative methods” for every piece of digital media I could, if that’s how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.
I still download and share all of Metallica’s discography out of spite, but haven’t listened to them since.
What division? Curious. I’m a mech eng specializing in HVAC. I didn’t get to attain my own PE stamp…life happened.
I do civil engineering work, mostly related to soils etc. I have a computer for work but that’s about as far as it gets for me professionally.
Awesome!
I love your origin story so much
I’m a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I’ve always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.
And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz
I’ve always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It’s so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
I work in advertising