For you, I suggest sticking to Discord. I am of the mind that your effort should be focused on your community instead of enforcing a FOSS philosophy upon a group that may not have any interest in doing so.

If you are creating a new community, this is a different conversation, of course.

This is great advice. I think the smaller NAS is a prudent investment now, and the more capable server can come later. I think I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good and keep me from investing in a local storage solution.

I think this is great advice. You’ve made me realize that I’m entering a stage of my training that is notorious for lack of free time, so maybe I’ll leave the self build tinkering for another day. It is more important for me to get the local storage going sooner than later but I will plan on building a tinkering PC someday.

I’d like to ask a clarifying question.

I’m interested in building a computer to self host from that would exclusively run on my local network. I would like to have some storage (on the order of 2x 16TB HDDs in RAID1 or 3x in RAID5) but also have the ability to host some other services, like Nextcloud, Arr stack, RSS feed, Immich for photos, and a Joplin server. I would probably put Wireguard on there to access these services remotely (but not the *arr stack).

Someday I might want to host some services that are accessible from the internet (not Wireguard), but I think that is for another time in my life.

I am gathering from your comments that, for more than strictly local storage, it is probably worth building a server with storage, rather than trying to stretch a Synology NAS to do all of this for me. Does that sound right?

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and am not sure if I sound just go with a Synology or self build. But I think I have more interest in tinkering with the system than a Synology would allow. I’m not totally new to self hosting, I have a VPS that serves a few apps and my blog online, and use an RPi at home to serve a few things. I suppose a third option is to buy the NAS, but then build a computer to host the other applications using the NAS data.

I’m a big fan of the weather app wX for US people. It is a no-frills NWS data explorer, with a great radar and widget. It doesn’t have the look of a modern app, persay, but the data are all there and very clear. (To get to the meteogram, long press on the radar widget on the home screen. I found this by accident, but am very happy I did.)

There is a fork of openboard with swiping at https://github.com/Helium314/openboard

Edit: you technically need to download the swiping library to keep it fully FOSS, but I am okay with that given there is no other alternative. Instructions on where to find a swiping binary are on the github

Edit edit: another fork of openboard with swiping here, but is less up to date https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard

Why not just use https://yams.media/

I use Zotero, which is open source, and sync it between my devices using syncthing. I know this may not be considered self-hosted by some, but it does put you in charge of your data.

If you only want the drive part of google–meaning just files–then seafile was way faster for me than nextcloud.

I’m looking forward to Read You incorporating FreshRSS api. For now I’ll happily use FeedMe

Photoprism is really quite nice for a containerized solution.

For mostly photos I’m a big fan of Digicam

On my VPS, every night I shut down the docker containers, then backup everything (including postgres & mariadbs) with borg using borgmatic, upload to backblaze b2, then restart the containers.

Also shout out for the TinyBit launcher fork for someone who wants custom icons and a few extras with the same concept

And I think that is a totally reasonable purpose to host it! I just wanted to see if I understood this correctly. I like the concept but am not sure if I want to spend another weekend setting up another VPS.

What are the privacy implications of you being the only person using an instance? I was under the impression that part of the privacy from SearXNG was by obfuscation because of many different people searching from the the same instance. I thought about self hosting it, but didn’t want to share with the vps I pay for now.

I’ve been a kagi subscriber for justa about a year and it’s been great.

Good point! I suspect it’s a lot more than we think. My parents are definitively still involved in doing this.

But on the other hand, does exchanging contacts mean anything to Facebook anymore? I don’t think that’s important to their income stream anymore. If the OP meant “these sites are still going strong but aren’t what they were when they began”, then of course I agree.

I think the “the internet is dying” perspectives are all incredibly overblown. They aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I remember all of the “Facebook is dead, I don’t know anyone using Facebook!” posts, but I suspect many here are invested in some index fund that is being pulled upwards by Meta.