The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.

Now I self host:

- Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology)

My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.

I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.

The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!

Do you host this with docker? It is usually the pain-free approach

Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.

The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.

If anyone has a solution I'd love to learn.

For android there is New Pipe and some forks.

I prefer to pay my yt loved channels than ser a fucking add

  > to block all ads on your home network?

I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block ads on my friends computer when they get into my network without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including ones I own.

And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right? You can recompile the app and others to get more control

We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.

yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.

Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)

Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.

Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)

Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.

There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.

My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton

I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.

Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're willing to spend for what tradeoff

Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.

So I effectively have multiple layers of backups.

>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.

I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?

For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.

I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.

I also visit my local library almost every week. They have a surprisingly excellent movie and tv catalog!

I have now cancelled all my movie and music streaming services!

I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich

In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.

Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).

And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.

What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?

I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.

Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.

The both of you,stop making things up.

Having parity on a one or more separate disks is one of the hallmarks of RAID4, and as such the comparison conceptually makes sense even if it's not literally RAID4. The actual state of their data protection is actually worse due to data not being striped across the data drives, reducing I/O, causing balancing issues, limiting large file sizes, and increasing risk of data loss if the wrong drive is killed at the wrong time. Modern software RAID not only solves all these problems, but also automatically heals bit rot and often includes compression support for both space savings and increased throughput. Unraid stalwartly refuses to grant these protections and enhancements to its users in the name of "simplicity", which I as a storage engineer must balk at.

Put your data at unnecessary risk if you want. I will shed no tears for you.

I'm flagging you both.

I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.

With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2.

I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.

You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination that does snapshots for example

Borg/restic are more complete solutions

I’ve been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking out flea markets for good deals.

With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two after being made. I want to make sure I still have access to the original versions.

I do often wish I was one of those people who didn’t care, and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but it’s not in the cards for me.

I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially the really old ones that were made before I was born.

Anything I want to keep I'll make a specific decision and move it to my RAID1 drive which is backed up off-site.

Do you know what version of the Abyss you are going to get? Is it that theatrical version that cut out a major plot point or the director's cut that includes it? What about Blade Runner? Do you want the original theatrical version or the super duper pointless extended Director's Cut? You don't get a choice with streaming, and you often don't even know what version it'll be.

I find this is even worse with music. Take the Beatles. Their songs have been remastered many times. Some of the remasters are good, and some of them ruin the music for me. But what version are you going to get? And, you may be listening to a good version today, but due to label negotiations, have it swapped out with a different version tomorrow.

I take a lot of pride in curating my personal media collection. I know these issues aren't important to everyone (and some people who might care are just unaware), but they are incredibly important to me.

With my usage I'm paying about $25 annually using S3. But if I ever need to full restore I'll be paying around $100 in data transfer fees.

When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.

I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.

I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.

If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.

There are plenty of old laptops that would be a great replacement, mine draws 8W at idle with 2x2TB SSDs: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar...

I’m interested in the next generation: arm64 machines with 2xM.2 slots could do wonders as an idler.

OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w

There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

It's a nightmare.

It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.

I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.

It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.

As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.

HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.

I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.

The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though

I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.

And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.

But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.

This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.

I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.

I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.