Pihole again, Vaultwarden, forgejo, syncthing
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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MeTube, for when my friends send me a video on a service I don't use (facebook, instagram, tiktok). It supports a lot of sites.
What's the flow there? Receive link, copy, open MeTube, paste, download watch?
Tiktok and Instagram links are so frustrating when friends send them.
Yeah, that's about it. You can watch it directly in the browser as well.
I have never thought of doing this. That's now going on my server.
Ohh good idea! At some point they stopped sending me videos as I was not able to watch them anyway :( thanks <3
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If you have a need for Calendar or To-dos, Radicale is a nice CalDAV/CardDAV server that's pretty tiny. For me its sitting there at idle using 35MB of RAM.
Small Update:
I set up Radicale as a replacement for EteSync (as it seems development has stalled, and I am paying for the VPS anyway) and so far it works great. Getting a “shared” calendar to work with symlinks was not that intuitive in a Podman setup, but I got it to work. Thanks for the suggestion!
Possibly underrated: CopyParty. Its an entire fileserver in a little over 1 MB. You can host it on anything that runs python and the client can be anything with a browser. It's unbelievably simple and efficient. If I knew self hosting was this easy I would have started sooner.
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XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.
My favorite as well.
Nice! I think XMPP is the best approach to messaging, as it is decentralized and can be E2E (and more mature than e.g. Matrix). The problem is that I won't be able to convince anyone I know to use XMPP (Signal was a huge struggle already).
For now you can use XMPP with the Slidge Signal gateway. At some point there will be an issue with Signal due to their centralized servers in the US and then you will be happy to not depend on it so much.
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Forgejo, pihole, freshrss, baikal, mealie, wg-easy, searxng
Thanks for the suggestions. Are you happy with the search results and UX of SearxNG?
KOreader Sync if you use KOreader. Easily pick up where you leave off on other devices!
I also run Wiki.js to (inconsistently) document what I'm doing with my apps and server.
Thanks! I own an e-reader, but as the stock software has served me well so far, I haven't had any reason to switch. Is KOReader worth it?
I moved all my books out of Amazon last year and host them for my family with Calibre Web. Jailbroke my Kindle and use KOreader exclusively, so I use Sync so that if I need to read while I'm out, I can just pick up on my phone.
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KOReader is great, basically swiss army knife, you can configure everything. Not the most intuitive UI though.
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Radicale - I ditched Nextcloud for it as no-one needed to see a calendar, it's on their phone...
I also use it to sync a calendar for Home Assistant too
And it effectively backs up my Contacts too.
Small static websites. You can get surprisingly performant and easily managed websites if you don't actually need the overhead of common frameworks. For instance giving your kid a real domain they can update and show to their friends.
On the slightly more resource intensive side, OpnSense has been a game changer for me.
I’m a big fan of static site generators. For the websites I maintain, switching from WordPress to Hugo reduced my workload a lot.
I set up a workflow using DecapCMS + Hugo + GitHub. Non-technical users can log in via GitHub to edit content on the CMS, and GitHub Actions automatically builds and deploys the site via SFTP.
GitHub is kinda meh, but it’s low-cost and gets the job done.
I'm in the process of switching from ipfire to opnsense myself.
I hate how bloaty opnsense is at first glance but it has so much more control so once I copy my current config I'll be leaving ipfire in the dust.
I think you will be back at Ipfire soon. OPNsense is a confusing mess and while IPfire certainly has its issues, at least it is easy to understand and it does what it is supposed to.
yea I have the machine backed up in case this happens. I have noticed that its a mess UI wise. But ipfire doesn't seem to be stable. every few months it'll randomly kill itself which will take everything on the network down until i manually restart the machine and then force tell it a new DNS server. It's something I've never managed to resolve on the machine, and I don't seem to have that issue with my test network with OPNsense.
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For blogs I found two interesting projects that are super minimal.
BashWrite uses only bash and sed commands but it seems to be no longer under development.
Another bash script that seems to have more development activity is BSSG. This one requires a markdown processor such as cmark or pandoc but it's still quite minimal.
I love minimalism and writing scripts so these two projects really interest me.
Well now you've got me trying BSSG :p
I'm thinking about finding an alternative to ntfy. The maintainers are increasingly vibe coding it.
I enjoy gotosocial, its such a lightweight fediverse server
Does it work well with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.? Or do you still have separate accounts there?
It works with most fediverse platforms (its in beta still, but gonna come out of beta soon!) not so much with lemmy as its more so microblogging
Sounds interesting. Thanks!
I found https://github.com/TwiN/gatus recently and its been a welcomed alternative to UptimeKuma (I have many hosts I monitor, so having a configuration file makes it far easier).
I run a Prometheus server at work, for doing ICMP latency checks, thats all I need at home. Gatus is super simple for my needs.
glance averages around 20MB of RAM per day on my home server. Others have mentioned syncthing, which is also very light on resources, and super useful.
ErsatzTV 🫡
2nd time I'm hearing about this service today. How's the experience?
I used to use Nextcloud and put files in there instead of Google Drive. That’s ok, but turns out, way more than I need. I use Nephele with the Owlfiles app now. It’s less resource intensive. Also, I can manage actual folders on my server. I have a simlink to my Jellyfin media folder and manage it from there.
Favourite? Probably Kavita.
I'm looking to sell Forgejo next myself
Grist
I know use spreadsheets for just about everything
do you already have monitoring solution for your vps? maybe prometheus/altermanager and the node_exporter?
otherwise i join the forgejo praise, and also enjoy etherpad (self hosted (limited) google doc)
how do you handle backups? recommendation: borg
No, so far I just hope nothing breaks :) will take a look!
With so many recommendations in this thread, Forgejo must be great. I've used it with Codeberg, but self-hosting seems a lot better (especially if they introduce federation at some point).
Thanks!
Low-footprint services are are great I have been using Shaarli for bookmarks for quite a while it never failed me, and is very easy on server resources ~50Mb of RAM
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