I’m not affiliated with this in any way but saw it posted at the other place & thought fellow Lemmyzens might like to take a look.
I always find it quite hard to answer “favorite” apps as some infrastructure critical self hosted apps aren’t as sexy as others which sit front & centre so I feel they often don’t seem to get as much credit or attention (such as NGinX/DuckDNS compared to Immich/Jellyfin etc)
Hi everyone,
Like in previous years, I’m running a survey about self-hosting. The focus is on your favorite self-hosted apps, but there are plenty of other (optional) questions too. The top five app lists are free response fields, you don’t have to select the suggestions.
Link to take the survey:
https://survey.deployn.de/s/self-host-2026
More info:
The survey is anonymous. Like last year, results will be published in aggregated form. I’m currently planning to publish them in December.
It takes about 10-25 minutes.
Some of you asked for more questions in the comments. I added a lot at first, then realized it took 45 minutes to fill out properly. So I threw some out again, but there are still quite a few. The survey now has a core section that mainly covers the MVPs (your 5 favorite apps), and you can switch on other modules if you want. Almost every question is optional and can be skipped. If you answer everything at a reasonable pace, it takes around 20 minutes.
The proprietary survey tool caused new problems every year, so last year I switched to HeyForm while the survey was already running. That wasn’t ideal for my purposes either, so this year the survey runs on a new app. It should also make entering your apps faster.
It’s still easier to fill out on a desktop computer.
Thank you in advance for participating.
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 1 device · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings
- My MVPs: AdGuard Home, Immich, Continuwuity
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Immich, Plex, opnsense, Nginx Proxy Manager, Gitea
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Radarr, Sonarr, Audiobookshelf
Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Plex, swag, pihole, Navidrome
I realized that I actually have just over 50TB now after replacing a failed hard drive. I’ve been using retired enterprise hardware and slowly replacing it all with stuff that is MUCH lower power consumption and I recently got a DGX Spark so I could work on some self-hosted ML work for physics modeling and helping me fix all the code I manage to break. (read: catch typos and formatting)
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Immich, Home Assistant, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden, Navidrome
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Sonarr, Portainer, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Emby, AdGuard Home
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: 6–10 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Immich, PeerTube, Ghost, Actual Budget, Home Assistant
I create videos for YouTube/PeerTube and backup all of the raw footage. The actual storage count is currently 130TB in my main NAS with about 250TB for an offsite cold storage backup (as most of my data doesn’t change much) and on-site live-ish backup. I also have the benefit of being able to get reputable used commercial grade HDDs from work for $10/TB, even right now, it makes it way too easy. Shameless plug of my PeerTube instance: https://joeltube.com/ or @JoelKalich on YouTube.
Data Hoarder 💾
-
Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
-
Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting
-
My MVPs: Pangolin, Nextcloud, kubernetes, freshrss, Jellyfin
-
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Learning & experimenting, Cost savings
- My MVPs: Audiobookshelf, AdGuard Home, Traefik, AMP, BookBridge
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Navidrome, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Teamspeak
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Actual Budget, Immich, Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Navidrome
Getting labelled “AI pioneer” would feel like being called a slur
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Radicale, Baikal, OPNSense, Home Assistant, AdGuard Home
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 1 device · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Cost savings, Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Audiobookshelf, Sonarr, Radarr, Mealie, Jellyfin
