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: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Forgejo, Navidrome, Syncthing, Chhoto URL
(Also, Immich is another MVP.)
Eternal Tinkerer 🔧
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Authelia, Vaultwarden, Caddy, frp, Forgejo
Yeah sounds about right. Also in the process of switching to running an IncusOS cluster from a single machine docker compose.
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 1 device · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions
- My MVPs: freshrss.org, Continuwuity, Caddy, Jellyfin, wordpress.org
I haven’t spent a dime on tech services since I started selfhosting, and I spend less than is often implied I will on electricity. Storage on the other hand, I need more of. I’ve only got a TB free right now, and I desperately need more storage. Planning to build an expandable NAS soonish.
Yeah I’ve been bordering on expanding storage for like a year or so. I should have just pulled the trigger when I was at like 50% capacity before the spike in prices when I first thought about upgrading
Since the vast majority of my storage is for digital backups of my media collection, I’m considering getting some white label drives. I’ve got some old white labels from over 20 years ago that are still kicking (I use them on my DOS machine) so I know they can last quite a while before failing. I suppose a few of those in RAID60 should be more than sufficient to guarantee my storage barring divine acts.
