Uptime Kuma maintainer here. The reason why I made this because I have some services like databases and websites cannot be down for a long time. I need someone send a notification to me if they are down.

If you think it is not improving your life, it is probably because you don’t have such similar scenario and you probably don’t need this indeed.

My point is that it may be not improving your life, but it improves my life at least, or others’. That’s just a choice.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news…

I’d say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it’s just a fancy way to tag documents. I don’t need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There’s a “before paperless” era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

Now, it’s a solid 100%.

Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I’d say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I’d still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that’s pretty much the only thing.

It’s all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It’s a wonderful mess.

I don’t run any containers.

I own my own data.

I back up my own computers.

My email is mine.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it, it’s not a competition, and you don’t have to do what everyone else does.

Having Nextcloud, PiHole and LibreELEC/Kodi is something I wouldn’t want to miss

I use my Nextcloud at my employment all the time. It’s a great way to get scripts I have written deployed on client machines.

I use my Exchange server for all my alerting and subscribed mail lists. Plus I have the Proxmox mail filter in front of that which is really good at keeping the spam away.

I have self deployed Bitwarden and have come to depend on that very quickly. Pihole and Zabbix are other tools I use as well as having tftp and anon ftp servers up. So yes, my homelab is part of what allows me to work effectively.

Can you tell me a bit more about how you use syncthing with nextcloud ?

Paperless, immich. seafile, nextcloud, minecraft, home-assistant, pihole, jellyfin - they all improve my or my family’s life.

I often have the issue it worth it debate with myself…

I use a turnkey version of Tracks for todo purposes- but is not life changing.

Also use plex for my music and movies (but also subscribe to 3 services but as these services removed content Plex has a place). Trying to buy my music on the smaller digital platforms or on second hand market - but fewer CDs available for newer content! 🤔.

On the plus side- your post has made me interested in paperless and obsidian.

Although being heavily on Apple not sure if there is a huge benefit over simple notes

Oh, I definitely have self hosted services that affect daily life. I don’t like when I’m not at home w/ pihole. I love paperless and mealie. Plex allowed me to move my DVD changers (400 each) to smart TVs and/or Fire Sticks which provide so much more in service. Every single user in the house can watch different content. It also allows recording of live content for later viewing. In the previous configuration, I never would have considered OTA content. I also have a service that backs up my Google Photos. I don’t usually think about my NVR as a service but I don’t want outsiders tempted to watch my cameras, even if I don’t point them inside the house. Home Assistant has changed so much of my life and it’d be so much less without Node Red and VS Code Server.

I have to say, I do IT for a living so I go to great lengths to not turn my home systems into a second job. I have undone several systems over the years that just required too much work with much less value in return. Typically, I spend 10-15 minutes a week doing what I call “Care and Feeding” of my systems. Normally, this would be just updating dockers and VMs. I may add work to my schedule when my notes from the previous week suggest that I investigate a new service. I will stand it up and play around with it to see if I can get it to work in a fashion I like and is useable.

Plex + all the arrs
Overseerr
Home Assistant

I know it’s boring, but all of these get used every day and they make my life way better. Except that my plex install has a corrupt DB entry and I don’t have the time/energy to blow up the database and re-setup my libraries. Restarting the cleaner fixes it for about 24 hours. Might just need to setup a cron job until I find some actual time.

There’s many, but the most improvement is plex with the whole servarr stack automating nearly everything behind the curtain. Plus notifiarr with trash guides library improvements.

Besides that, home assistant also improves my life quite a lot.

I’m running quite many apps. Just some:

Linkding to collect bookmarks Mealie to collect recipes Nextcloud syncing to photoprism Syncthing to backup the phone on the fly (downloads, app backups, GPS logs to replace Google time-line)

I buy DVDs at the thrift store for $1 and put them on my Emby server. I could (but don’t) just torrent all the things, like most people, but that isn’t fun. Finding a movie I like reminds me of going to Blockbuster as a kid. At the same time, I like the modern conveniences and features of the “Netflix” type software. It’s just a better all-around experience than what I get with DVD alone.