I own a ridiculously overkill server setup, due to my addiction to tinkering, fostered in part by the amazing Home Operations community.
It consists of 4 hosts in total (3 visible on the image, one small HP Mini desktop PC between the Dell and the HP tower), all running Proxmox with a combination of various virtual machines, most importantly TrueNAS and Talos Linux.
You might be thinking:
Talos Linux? That runs Kubernetes, right? Isn’t that overkill?
Yes. Yes it is.
In any case, what am I actually running on there? Cause with this much compute, I can do a LOT.
by the way, most of the images on here are clickable, and link to the service being discussed
Immich
My pride and joy, the service that single-handedly justified my server setup. Immich is a photo management service, with an incredible mobile app that works seamlessly, with machine learning and facial recognition that isn’t just LLMs hallucinating everything! Funny that!
I used to be really… laissez-faire with my images, both in part due to my gender dysphoria, and a lack of automated backup that didn’t cost money. Immich changed that, and changed it for the better.
Please ignore the fact that I mostly just use it to store photos of my cat. Like this one!
Do you think she nose?
Miniflux
I don’t wanna go all “new thing bad old thing good” on you, but I’ve been starting to get back into the “old” kind of internet usage, one of which being my recent love for RSS. Social media is, well… You know how it is. And I also didn’t wanna bother going first to Lobste.rs, then to Hacker News, then to Phoronix, and so on, or even worse - just wait until the headlines fall into my lap on Bluesky.
Instead, I thought - why not RSS? That’s a tried and true solution, and plenty of sites have support for it! So I set up Miniflux, loaded a bunch of websites (like the previously listed), and it’s perfect! It’s my go-to “morning paper”! And for sites that don’t have RSS support, like Instagram, where a lot of recipe content is, I have another ace up my sleeve…
RSSHub
RSSHub allows one to access lots of different websites that don’t have an RSS feed from the comfort of your RSS reader. I mostly use it for selected Pixiv artists and Instagram cooks (the former for convenience, the latter because I don’t want to use Instagram). I could use one of the many public instances, but Facebook LOVES banning those, because they’re bastards.
To any artist that might be reading this: please make a website! It’s good for you, and for your users! And include an RSS feed! A good example is gg8473’s, which is a mainstay of my RSS reader.
“F*ck It, Let’s Make a Website” is made by the incredible artist Nolnir
Jellyfin
Being a weeb and a selfhosting afficionado, I of course run my own media server, with… Linux ISOs. After my initial stint with Plex, I found that for some reason it had AWFUL performance on my servers, no matter what I tried. Jellyfin, on the other hand, with the Intro Skipper plugin, is amazing!
This website
That’s right! This website is hosted on my own server! I use a simple Nginx container that points to a bucket on my Minio server.
Missing links
Here’s a list of stuff I wish I had:
Better music player for Jellyfin
The currently offered music player solutions on Android are either locked to the outdated Subsonic API, which doesn’t support OAuth (I really want to have everything hooked up to my Authelia authentication service, without needing multiple different accounts), are butt-ugly, or closed source and paid. Currently, I’m using Symfonium, which is the latter, but I wish I had something better.
Spotifake
The benefits of hosted music players like Spotify or YouTube Music is the discovery, and that part is sort of what keeps me using YTMusic. What I want is one of those YouTube Music frontends, but with fallback to local storage, and preferably with a hookup to Lidarr, so I can save the songs I like.
At the same time, I feel like the things I want come from two different tribes: one clinging to the past with their .m3u8’s and files that prefer manually syncing their music to their devices, and the other accessing their music via streaming, be it legitemate or not. It seems that I can have one, but not the other, but I want benefits of both.