A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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.
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 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
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'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.
R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
[Thread #87 for this comm, first seen 12th Feb 2026, 16:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Privacy and ownership
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 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.