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 · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Firefly III, Caddy, Proxmox Backup Server
Reeks of Claude
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Cost savings
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Linkwarden, Vaultwarden, Syncthing, Netbird
Not reddit, but lemmy…
Community classics you run : 0 Edgy of edginess
I wanted to do the survey, but at some point the ui is barely understandable (#10 or so) and I gave up shortly after. And that’s from a nerd.
Fleet Commander 🚀
- Fleet: 6–10 devices · 5–10 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting, Cost savings
- My MVPs: Authentik, Kavita, Continuwuity, Suwayomi, Nextcloud
AI Pioneer 🤖
- Fleet: 1 device · 21–50 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 1 device · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Nextcloud, Traefik, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Audiobookshelf
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · 11–20 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
- My MVPs: Home Assistant, Navidrome, Jellyfin
Homelab Veteran ⚡
- Fleet: 4–5 devices · 1–4 TB
- Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, miniflux, Navidrome, Authelia, beets
I know beets is not something self hosted, but it’s very important for me, as I’m a music collector and like to have everything very well tagged.
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: More than 10 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Learning & experimenting, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
Self-Hoster 🏡
- Fleet: 1 device · Less than 1 TB
- Motivation: Fun / the hobby itself, Customization & full control, Learning & experimenting
- My MVPs: Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale, Karakeep, Immich, Syncthing
Looking at last year’s survey, the number of self-hosted devices has 2-3 first. And Raspberry Pi is most popular.
I wonder about this, because I have Pi for Pi hole, and one for Home Assistant, each dedicated. Then almost everything I self host is on a different server. But this still represents Raspberry Pi twice as much as the main server. I think Pis may be most popular because there’s many single-purposes uses for them.
I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.
If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)
Data Hoarder 💾
- Fleet: 2–3 devices · More than 50 TB
- Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself, Privacy & data ownership
- My MVPs: Jellyfin, Plex, Foundry, Immich, Pangolin
