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My Four Favorite Self-Hosted Solutions That I Use Every Day

These are my personal choices if I had to pick four self-hosted pieces of software that I wouldn't want to live without. I self-host a lot more than these four services, but most are on a “trial” basis meaning I haven't decided yet if I want to keep them around or not.

Also, I didn't include “infrastructure” services that mostly exists to support selfhosting in the first place (like “Caddy” for reverse proxying or “Portainer” to manage docker containers).

The list

Immich

This one is my favorite. It basically replaces Google Photos or any similar service, and I think it is great. The user experience is already much better than Google ever was, and I'm 100% in control of my own data. It has all the features I need, including face recognition and other AI tagging features.

I've even set it up for a close family member, even though I generally try to avoid IT responsibilities like that. It just works so well.

I've come to rely on it as my primary photo backup service despite the software still being in very active development. It's not my only backup, so I'm not too worried about it failing. I can rebuild it easily.

The actual photos are backed up in multiple places, so I can restore the service from scratch should it fail completely. Upgrading the service has historically not always been straight-forward, but it has stabilized somewhat in the last year or so. I suspect the worst is over in that regard now that the software is more mature.

Redlib

This is such a simple service, yet I wouldn't want to live without it. Basically, it is a proxy for Reddit with a custom interface. That's it. It doesn't even have any backend state, and you get a readonly version of reddit. Yet it is my preferred way to consume content from Reddit.

Why? It loads really fast, no ads, no dark patterns, custom color schemes. It basically made experiencing Reddit into what I liked about it 10 years ago. You can't post or otherwise interact with the content, but I'm over that anyway. Most of the great content is also at least two years old at this point.

And as for actually using Redlib, you need a browser extension like LibRedirect. Whenever you click a link to Reddit, you can set it to redirect to your Redlib instance of choice.

2FAuth

I was debating with myself whether I should include this or not in the list. I'm not sure hosting 2FA as a web app is such a good security practice in the first place. Avoid having this on the open internet at the very least. I also end up using the codes on the same device where I need them. Maybe I should not recommend it or admit that I rely on it.

Nevertheless, I'm really glad that it exists. I'm not comfortable having my phone as the only devices that can generate 2FA codes. If it breaks or is lost, I'm locked out of everything. There are other ways to backup codes of course, but I prefer something that I own and selfhost.

Also, I much prefer to get 2FA through my PC than having to open up my phone every time. That part is mostly laziness.

FreshRSS

FreshRSS just works. It's a simple service for subscribing and reading RSS feeds in a browser. I had initially decided not to use it, but couldn't find something else I like instead. I thought FreshRSS looked dated and cumbersome, but after taking the time to set it up properly, import my feeds, it actually works pretty well.

When I realized that it works incredible well as progressive web app (or something like it), it was a no brainer. It's not native, but I have it “installed” on my phone (as a shortcut), and use it everyday to read the news. I can read the complete feed, or choose specific categories to dive into. No algorithms. It's all chronological. And there are many more ways to setup and configure RSS feeds (in some cases using other services in addition to this) that I have yet to explore.