I assume most users here have some sort of tech/IT/software background. However, I’ve seen some comments of people who might not have that background (no problem with that) and I wonder if you are self-hosting anything, how did you decide that you would like to self-host?
No background but I can read and listen. There are plenty of resources around.
I started out of privacy concerns and I wanted to deGoogle It started this year with a RPI and pihole. Then I saw Mealie, bought a domain, and started sharing recipes with my family.
At first I messed around with Casa OS. It’s like a gateway drug. So easy to use and get stuff running.
Last week a 2nd hand i5 arrived and now I moved everything to proxmox. The RPI is still running pihole. At the moment I’m setting up Immich and I’m thinking about buying a NAS.
Since it is a new hobby I keep everything low cost. If it sticks I’ll invest in a proper home server.
De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.
Engineering background for reference.
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Are you me?
I love unRAID so much. It’s crazy how just a simple GUI can help solidify docker concepts.
I work in emergency management but I’ve always been interested in tech as a hobby. That led me to start self-hosting Plex on my desktop about 6-7 years ago. Now I’ve got a dedicated machine running unraid with about 20 to 30 different docker services.
I really enjoy being able to figure out how to setup a service and then being able to be fully in control of how it works. Beyond just enjoying tinkering with the system to learn, I enjoy being able to troubleshoot and fix problems without relying on large companies.
If plex counts… Then also me. I work in retail. I can’t escape. I have a degree in tech, but not enough work experience.
I work in logistics. I’ve always had a fascination with tech, and was leery of all these neato things on offer from big tech, from social media to the cloud.
Found out I could self-host, and got to learning.
My one and only reason is that I’m a turbo-nerd. No professional or even educational tech background at all.
Same been using computers my whole life so self hosting was just gonna be apart of it.
Self hosting is your pathway to a tech background.
University for comp sci, in my experience around the space, is a complete waste of time. Just a piece of paper that may or may not equip the recipient with some skills that may or may not be relevant.
University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.
Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.
When they were installing the alarm at my house I noticed that the main guy had nextcloud on his phone and it sparked a nice conversation about privacy. He has no technical background but managed to self-host it on his old laptop with one of those distros that have an easy UI for self-hosting (don’t remember which one exactly). He’s a pretty cool guy.
Proxmox or Unraid?
I clean construction site toilets. I wanted to run my own game and media severs and ended up with a Dell Poweredge, a synology 1u NAS and some ubiquity gear
I have no tech background, and I am just getting into creating a media server. I started with an old secondhand Synology NAS, which developed a power issue within a month and no chance of returning it or getting it covered by warranty.
My current plan is to get another Synology NAS (new with extended warranty this time), along with a spare HDD enclosure so I can have an extra layer of redundancy, finally set up Jellyfin, and then I want to build a Pihole. At that point I won’t need much more self hosting or networking tricks until further notice.
Still have no idea what I’m doing.
Mechanical engineer here self-hosting my own Lemmy and Pixelfed instances in a Yunohost VM on an old Ubuntu box. It just feels better being my own admin.
Kudos for self-hosting fediverse stuff, man.
Thank you!
My father in law was a commercial pilot and he had a home server just to keep photos and travel writing while he was flying and away from home a lot. I helped him upgrade some of that to the cloud, since that makes for sense when on the other side of the country, but he still has a bunch of stuff at home.
I’m a college professor in the humanities (religious studies, history). Got into linux about 5 years back, partly because it comports better with my lefty politics than the alternatives, but also just because I’ve long been a closet computer nerd. I currently run a couple of proxmox servers on old optiplexes I grabbed off ebay. Full *arr stack with jellyfin on docker, a Tails VM for TOR stuff, NAS (omv on a vm), some other dockerized stuff: linkding, radicale, alexandrite (a self-hosted lemmy client, which I’m currently writing this on), various backup utilities.
It’s basically just a hobby for me, though the switch to linux has also totally changed my academic workflow, e.g. I do all my writing in nvim + latex now, use syncthing to sync my home desktop, laptops, and office computer, etc. I dig divesting myself from corporate computing to the greatest extent possible, appreciate the privacy benefits, and generally just enjoy the community-driven spirit of the whole thing.
Just getting started but yeah, I have basically no technology background. Mostly I’m too stubborn to know when to quit something so here I am lol.
Sufficiently qualifiedd to be working in IT.
I’ve never been in tech professionally, I’m a truck driver (now working in the office of company but still drive sometimes) but I have always been into tech. I selfhost as much as possible. Bitwarden, jellyfin, seafile, etc. and also run a Lemmy instance. I like tech projects and control.
Hi, I’m a chef. I’m just playing around with raspberry pis and stuff. I just like learning and seeing what I can do.