I grew out of just about everything in my old digital library so it’s been long gone, but I didn’t realize just how much stuff I had on my old bandcamp account already. Grabbed all of that, bought a bunch more, obtained everything else from my Tidal rotations and slapped it all into Navidrome.

The initial setup is definitely a pain but the payoff has been tremendous. Not financially though - I spent more buying new shit from small artists than I would spend on a streaming service in a year. But that goes so much further for them than streaming does anyway.

1. Tuta

2. Self-hosted Nextcloud

3. Organic Maps for lookups, Magic Earth for navigation

4. Self-hosted SearXNG

5. LibreWolf on desktop, Fennec on mobile

6. Tuta or Nextcloud, haven’t really settled yet and I barely use a calendar as-is

7. Android built-in with Nextcloud sync

8. Nextcloud

9. Nextcloud (Collabora) and LibreOffice

10. Trying to get my family on Signal, but due to some holdouts and RCS not being available on anything but Google’s messenger, I still keep their SMS app around. Mostly use Discord though realistically, likely soon to be Matrix.

11. N/A

12. Bluesky mostly. Not ideal but keeping up with active blocklists to shut out anyone right of center makes it much more usable.

13. Navidrome with Feishin (desktop, also have a self-hosted web player just because) and Symfonium (mobile). Beets for metadata management

14. Jellyfin for streaming, still use the “official” youtube app but Revanced really helps with it

15. Self-hosted Vaultwarden + Bitwarden

16. PiHole for DNS (need to set up Unbound still, maybe a weekend project). Mullvad VPN on everything. My Wireguard connection to my homelab actually routes out through Mullvad, so one VPN connection lets me access my LAN while protecting my outbound traffic.

17. GrapheneOS, Nova launcher

18. Split between F-droid, Aurora, and the Play Store for when the other two don’t work. I try to use it as little as possible

19. Self-hosted Immich. Aves Libre for local image management.

20. I swear everything I use just has its own weather integration with a random site I’ve never heard of LMAO. GrapheneOS recommends BreezyWeather for widgets which works pretty well.

21. None, never, fuck that shit.

22. Aegis for 2FA, Heliboard for a mobile keyboard. Set up a whole bunch of self-hosted tools which don’t replace anything for me but help me manage things I’ve been slacking on: ActualBudget, Paperless (digital file cabinet), Mealie (cookbook app), just to name a few.

I’m about 80% of the way there. I’ve been slacking on migrating things over to my Tuta email since I set up forwarding from my old Gmail accounts.

My last major holdouts are Fi (nothing else remotely compares price-wise in this area), Google’s phone and messenger, and the pixel camera. The very second third party apps start using RCS, messenger is out (or if I can get the rest of my family on to Signal). The screening features of the phone app are too good to give up just yet, and the same goes for the quality of the Pixel camera - nothing comes close to those just yet.

My wife was mentioning the other day that if something happened to me she’d have absolutely no idea how to work any of this shit and that convinced me to actually start documenting it LMAO

Good time to start doing it too. Aside from setting up a NAS this weekend and figuring out an audiobook solution (not something I’ve ever dabbled with but I really should start reading some communist theory), I’ve got this project right where I want it for a long while.

Yep, big time. Basically dead at this point, forcing payments to stream your own content.

I started setting up my homelab last month and immediately went to Jellyfin because Plex just screamed “corporate bullshit” to me. Sure enough, it was the right call.

I’m putting together a pretty simple one this week. Got a used HP Elitedesk G4 SSF for around $150, already have 2 8TB external drives lying around that are easy enough to shuck and slap into it. Should be pretty easy to just slap TrueNAS Scale onto it, set up a mirror with the 2 drives, and be good to go for a while.

I’ll definitely need more space down the road and this thing can’t fit more than 2 drives without some modifications (3 is doable, but 4 will take some 3D printed parts which I believe someone’s still working on fine-tuning). But it’s good enough for me for now, still got 2.5TB I’m not using.

If I thought about storage a bit more before starting this project, I probably would’ve just gotten the same SSF but with some slightly better specs to use as the entire server, rather than running 2 different machines, but oh well.

Edit: Slight change of plans, got a 12tb drive free through a program at work, so gonna go with UnRAID instead. The license fee is a bit disappointing but it seems to suit my needs better, and being able to mix and match drives of any size at will is pretty nice

Grab the entire series, load it up on the tv, and let it rip all day

I started this about a month ago, absolutely no idea what I was doing, and in that short time this little box has grown a ton. Got the basics for cloud storage, jellyfin with the arr suite, navidrome to replace spotify/tidal, etc. Got my scanner going right into paperless, finally starting a budget planner with actualbudget, even set up homebox to maybe eventually keep track of my collections of random bullshit. Spent 3 days fighting with Wireguard and gluetun to make a single VPN connection that’ll hook me into my LAN but also output all my traffic through Mullvad, using pihole as my DNS - I should get Unbound set up at some point too but that’s a project for another day.

Today I learned about homeassistant, and while I’m not one to care about IoT shit or whatever, just dabbling with NFC tags for the lights and such has been pretty neat.

This week I’m getting a second machine in that I’m going to use exclusively as a NAS and stop relying on USB external hard drives.

I really just wanted a little 24/7 Bob Ross box with a bit of cloud storage, and this project blew up a lot more than I thought it would LOL

I ran into some broken site issues with IronFox (which is completely understandable), but after tweaking every setting I could possibly find I couldn’t resolve them. Fennec is a good compromise for me

And get invested in local movements for actual left representation, especially in the US where we’re stuck with 2 far right parties.

Incredible info, thank you so much for this. Next investment will definitely be a couple of extra drives then - the 8 will be fine for a bit but I’m definitely gonna outgrow that space within a month or two

This is all super helpful, appreciate it. Just for clarity, the mini PC right now is one of those tiny HP EliteDesks. Definitely no room to fit any extra drives, but I already pulled the trigger on a second machine after doing some more research, and that should be plenty for something that’s basically just going to be a storage box.

Good catch on the redundancy, at the time posting this I didn’t realize I needed the physical space/drives to set up that safety net. 8 should be plenty for the time being. Say if I wanted to add another drive or two down the road, what sort of complications would that introduce here?

I do have a backup plan but the mirror safety net is definitely a good call, since it’s not an ideal solution. Right now I’m storing most backups internally, on a small USB drive, and uploaded to a b2 bucket, while I’m manually backing up all of that plus my media/emulation library to a 20TB external drive once a month and shoving it in my storage unit in between.

Good to know network latency shouldn’t be too noticeable, guess that does make sense. I don’t expose anything publicly, LAN/VPN only and it’s just my wife and I here, so I’m not too concerned with locking down access any more than it needs to be.

I completely forgot about this thing

This is actually really helpful and reassuring, even if I’m not planning on going that far with it just yet. tbh it feels like I’m overcomplicating the entire concept in my head, but that’s par for the course

I’ve got a shitty little android one I impulse bought a while back, I should play around with it

This is exactly it. A lot of my good friends are from my old smash melee days, and my current circle is mostly from destiny 2. I don’t play either game these days or keep in the loop with the games’ overall communities, but that doesn’t change much with this crew. Hell, someone I met through destiny LFG years ago flew out to my wedding last year.

These services aren’t super expensive and they tend to do a pretty efficient job. I had a weirdo trying to doxx me for a year and was just pulling outdated info off broker sites, it’s a pain in the ass and clearing out that into all at once helps ease the mind.

Looks incredible but reminder that Microsoft is currently a priority target of the BDS boycotts. This is my most anticipated game of the past few years and I’m holding off until they divest.

That’s what I’ve been using and it works great, though I’d prefer to use something FOSS. But everyone just always seems to vouch for Magic Earth and I guess vetted their privacy policy pretty well.

That’s what I’ve been doing too LOL. It’s basically just my Notepad replacement.

Absolutely. It was a pain in the ass to get up and running, but it’s running smooth with this setup. You can probably streamline and clean this up a bit but it’s working for me:

https://pastebin.com/ZWex1xvz

Also just to note, the caddyfile changes aren’t necessary for Immich, that’s just for any service without an integration that you still want to lock down. Immich’s integration is pretty straightforward once authelia itself is up and running.