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.
I’m surprised we don’t have something like this for this community. Curious what everyone uses through out the Fediverse
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 1 device · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Navidrome, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Linkwarden, Paperless-ngx
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Sabnzbd, *arr, LemonadeAI, Kimai, Manager.io
Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: BookStack, Plex, Home Assistant, music Assistant, Grafana
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Mythtv, PocketID, Plex, Immich, Home Assistant
Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: 6–10 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Home Assistant, Immich, Jellyfin, Mailcow, Navidrome
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Immich, Navidrome, Dockhand, Proxmox VE, Caddy
Eternal Tinkerer 🔧
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Proxmox VE, Nginx Proxy Manager, WireGuard, iptables, Bind9
Self-Hoster 🏡
-
Fleet: 1 device · Less than 1 TB
-
Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Customization & full control
-
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Proxmox VE, Paperless-ngx, Immich, Jellyfin
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Outline, Home Assistant, Plex, Audiobookshelf, Caddy
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting, Cost savings
This survey definitely looks vibe-coded as heck lol but I hope the results will be good.
My results :)
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Immich, Baikal, Forgejo, qBitTorrent, Home Assistant
God knows I wasn’t going to put cost as a motivation… I am actively losing money running double the storage I am using and 100+ GB of RAM on a Xeon chip, but having the headroom is certainly nice and has allowed me to expand as much as I want. Getting a good deal a couple of years back before the price explosion was a huge stroke of luck. If this server ever failed I could figure out a smaller operation with more confidence.
Cost was one of my motivations, but it wasn’t cost to me. Most of the people using my server definitely can’t afford to subscribe to all those streaming services.
Glad you mentioned that. A lot of folks are saying costs isn’t a good reason (for valid reasons), but I don’t think the other users costs are typically thought of. I don’t host to a lot of people, but they are active and use a few different services I host. That easily multiplies the cost savings imo.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code Plex Brand of media server package
[Thread #116 for this comm, first seen 27th Sep 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Cost savings, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: Pi-hole, Plex, Radarr, Linkwarden
