AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.

Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.

Your own wiki, and your own social media-type service

I post miscellaneous notes to my social media-type service, and save lists and more organised information (including recipes) to my wiki.

Jellyfin and Immich, first and foremost. From there, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, RustDesk, Docmost, and Nephele.

(Full disclosure: Nephele is my own service. I find it quite useful.)

• media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
• photos: immich
• game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you’re into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn’t open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you’ll have on any platform.
• recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
• if you’re a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management

Off the top of my head:

• Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
• Immich (Google Photos replacement)
• Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
• LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
• Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
• Jellyfin (Primary media server)
• Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
• Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
• Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
• Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.

Searxng. Just use a private instance.

Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

If you have a Nvidia graphics card 1070 and above, then openwebui. You can selfhost your own LLM. AMD is probably supported but haven’t checked.

Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it’s a hackjob of a self-host solution and I’m ashamed of how it works.

To address your examples directly:

Media server: Jellyfin, along with an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.

Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!

Recipe management: Mealie is the best I’ve used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.

Other things I have going:

Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.

MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don’t have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it’ll give you the video. Here’s all the websites it supports.

Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?

I use:

• Immich for photo hosting
• Jellyfin and navidrome for media (video and audio)
• Calibre and calibre-web for ebooks
• Minecraft server
• Mealie for recipes.
• Home assistant for automation
• Habitica for habit forming
• And I have fpp for my Christmas lights (the application is xlights, fpp is the server that runs the scripts)

All of these I like.

I just found and set up Gameyfin (a play on Jellyfin). Still in the testing it out phase, but I love the idea of a collection of my friends and my DRM free games that we can all share with less reliance on big companies.

Home Assistant might be of interest.

Additionally, pi hole, Immich, and things based on your hobbies might be fun. I recently started hosting a Grafana service to send my garmin data to since I like seeing my health data. I know you didn’t want grafana, but using a hobby as an example. What are some of your hobbies?

If you want to get straight to the fun, I might recommend: https://cosmos-cloud.io/

It will handle all of the uninteresting stuff like docker, reverse proxies, ssl certificates, etc. You can get straight to adding apps either by pasting in a docker-compose, or getting them straight from the cosmos marketplace.

Also, it works with standard tools, so other than the reverse proxy, it’s easy to migrate away from if you want. I think the reverse proxy is just caddy, but I don’t know where the caddy config file goes or how to pull it out of the funky cosmos config format.

I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself.

Well, you kind of have to have the infrastructure to make the fun happen. Docker is probably one of the more easy to deploy from the standpoint of someone just standing up a server.

• media server: Navidrome is what I use, but there are a plethora of choices
• photos app: Immich is quite popular, but again there are a list of them
• game servers: There are several that I know of like Doom , Minecraft, iirc there is a Quake server, I think you can integrate Steam. I can’t run games because of a seizure condition, but maybe others can chime in.
• home automation: HomeAssistant, NodeRed, N8N, Ansible, just literally tons of automation

These and thousands of other apps can be deployed via Docker. You don’t have to use docker, you can install on bare metal as well, tho containers make things neat and tidy.

As far as ‘fun’, to me it’s all fun. I selfhost for the utility, privacy, security, and anonymity of it, the educational part of it, and because it’s fun. My version of fun is going to vary widely from yours probably, but I find learning quite fun. Sky’s the limit pretty much.

Weather station, terrestrial/satellite TV DVR (TVHeadend), Git repository (Forgejo for a nice web UI, cgit for a classic UI), DNS resolver.