I’ve completely eliminated my use of Amazon with retailers on eBay. It has worked out well where I am.

I’ve been through this whole process and wanted to make the best choice and explore all options myself. In the end my conclusion ended up being what most people online recommended after all: keep NAS and compute separate and that Debian is best for a Linux server. Now I have a Synology NAS and a 12th gen Intel mini PC. I run most of what you mention above and it works great.

I spent ages looking at so many sources to learn and get this set up. After I got it all done, I found this is one simple guide that basically covered the whole process and I really with O found this early: https://thecybersecguru.com/tutorials/self-hosting-guide/

You can add a folder to Immich as an external database. I didn’t want Immich to upload in the way you describe, so I stopped Immich auto upload and use a different solution to upload files onto my NAS in a normal folder structure and date/naming system. Then Immich just scans these folders every 6 hours to add photos into the library. This external folder is added in volumes under immich-server and immich-machine-learning. It has been working fine so far.

There’s also the Nora app on f-droid.

Jellyfin has been the thing I use most for my kids. I’ve got an account for them with their movies and TV shows. If they’re interested in YouTube videos (they like some music lyric videos and Mario play through videos) so I download these and put them onto Jellyfin to keep them away from YouTube. I’ve also put their music on the server and put a music app on their device.

The other thing I tried was deploying an Element server so they could talk to family on their own without risk of exposure to the world at large, but ended up abandoning this.

The other use of the server for kids has been to hold the ROMs for the emulator games they play and Syncthing to sync saves across devices.

One kid is interested in taking and sharing pictures so I’m thinking of making a user for him in Immich.

Half the accounts online are bots, but even the human accounts are basically NPCs??

How? How can people tell? Someone points this out for most content posted. It seems like a race to be the first to say “AI slop”. Between actual AI slop, and content accused of being AI slop; there really isn’t much content left to be able to enjoy online.

Just Mad Max your vehicle. Bumpers, spikes and flames on the sides of your car will convince people to kindly yield.

-sumation

-stitution

As a child then every year is purposefully pointed out. School education years, birthdays, clothes for your age, siblings being older/younger.

As an adult when you stop paying careful attention then time all merges into one mass. Age doesn’t really matter much and certainly isn’t pushed in your face constantly. It’s easy to keep doing repetitive things at work and home and before you know it then another 4 years go by without you keeping track. I did a job with a very extended period of postgraduate training (10 years). Then again there was a constant interest in your year of training and what stage you are at. Even other events in life are better bookmarked (that happened when I was in year 5 of my training).

If you’re more mindful of the time, then it seems to pass more slowly and is better delineated.

It works fine with 2 simultaneous direct play streams. Haven’t tested beyond that.

All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM?

My dashboard says that containers are using 50% of the ram. The server PC itself is using a bunch of ram on top of that because I ended up installing g Debian with the full KDE desktop emvironment. I ended up removing some resource hogs that I didn’t need (Element server, Linkwarden, etc).

The best way to get to grip with how this works is to start using it.

Yup works great. The NAS drive auto mounts as an NTFS drive on the server with read/write access. All works smoothly.

You don’t need much to self host and don’t let people online gatekeep or exclude you or intimidate you with complex racks. An old PC repurposed to a home server gets you started and is enough for a lot of stuff. You can always expand as needed in the future.

Here’s my setup:

Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don’t need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I’ll just replace it when I get to that point.

Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc). I’m building a new machine and have yet to decide if I want to replace the server or use that as a gaming machine, but the has a Core 5 Ultra 125H processor and LPDDR5 RAM and is super power efficient and silent.

Docker containers:

• actual (budgeting)

• affine (note taking)

• bentopdf (PDF editing)

• beszel (server status monitoring)

• dockge (Docker management)

• guacamole (server remote desktop access)

• immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)

• jellyfin (video and music server)

• jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)

• kavita (comic books and ebooks)

• kopia (backups)

• floccus (bookmark backup and sync across browsers)

• mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)

• papra (document scanning and OCR)

• opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)

• prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)

• samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)

• syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)

• tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)

• vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)

• watchtower (automatic docker updates)

Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.

Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.

Why try to sell here? The number of people on Lemmy is tiny. You need to advertise the phone in a place where loads of people can see. Facebook marketplace or eBay.

Consume art. It helps a lot to read/watch/hear some content that is similar to your experience and resonates with you. Helps to know that you’re not alone and others have experienced/reflected/studied these experiences before. Reading philosophy helps me as well. Might not talk exactly about my situation, but gives the tools and processes to help me think through my issues.

You would think that in this age of instant, free, accessible communication; finding someone to share with would not be difficult. But somehow people care about each other’s problems less than ever. I’ve never found any Lemmy social group that connects people.

Grayjay

Easily the best video streaming app. Uses sponsorblock on youtube as well. Lets you consolidate all your video feeds in one place. I wouldn’t bother using Nebula without this.

Theres no safe space to go to where people don’t keep forcing in politics…and then get angry if you say you don’t want politics.

Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.

You’re not wrong, but that’s not the conversation man.