If something interests you, set it up. If you find you don't need it, take it down.

I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don't like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I've cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.

Once upon a time I set Grocy for my wife and I. It's a kitchen inventory management site that can do some pretty cool things. I spent a whole weekend scanning every barcode in our kitchen and getting a bunch of recipes setup on the site. After all that we used it for maybe two or three weeks before it felt like to much work lol.

I spent a lot of time setting up firefly-iii, a really neat and feature-rich finance manager. It's a really great piece of software by a very responsive and friendly dev but after about 6 weeks I still couldn't get used to it and ended up going back to paying for YNAB.

I swear by memos now though - highly recommended. It's like having a private twitter stream where you can send thoughts, notes and files that you want to store/refer back to.

I'm hosting Photoprism, now. But man, do I just barely use it. I'm not a photographer, and I always have the worst camera of anyone around me, so I'm never taking pictures. It's running, and I'm not taking it down. But it did teach me to use docker compose. I switched everything I had after that.

Matrix was one that was hard to justify. It was just too heavy. My dream has always been "use one app for all communication". I bridged Signal, Discord, and Facebook. Problem number 1 was that SMS is like impossible to set up. Problem 2 no one uses Signal except me and my wife. Problem 3 was that my Facebook got flagged for suspicious activity, and they wanted my ID to recover it. I used this as a chance to ditch Facebook, but I also ditched Matrix at this time. Signal supports SMS, so I could do more with it than Matrix. I'll probably try again down the line.

My most used service is definitely my music service, Navidrome. You might try it, it's very light. I used to keep all my files on my phone like you. And my phone had an SD slot, so storage wasn't an issue. But I couldn't listen from any of my computers, or at work. After I made the switch, I painstakingly re-'aquired' all of my music in FLAC, and have my phone set with a size limit of music to cache, as well as always downloading my favorites.

I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past... but eventually both came unstuck, because:

• SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
• NextCloud - just wasn't a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn't that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I'm not using it.

These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I'd had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.

linkding was one for me. It sounded like a great idea at first, but, I never used it. Shut it down after a couple months.

Oh I have quite a few that I've set up then pulled out of service for various reasons. I'm always evaluating potential use-cases for new services and if a different service would better suit my needs than what I have deployed currently. It's definitely a hobby.

Some container-based projects that I'm loosely tracking updates for and have deployed, but since, have pulled out of service (non-exhaustive):

Media:

• Calibre / Calibre-Web

  • Supplanted by Audiobookshelf. For tagging and book conversion I just temporarily install Calibre on my Workstation when the need arises.

• FreshRSS

  • Did not end up using it for much at the time. Re-evaluating if I'd like to stand it up again.

• Plex

  • Plex is nice but too many drawbacks that don't work for me. Supplanted with Jellyfin.

• Overseerr

  • Didn't have much use for this, but it will likely change soon. Since I've stuck with Jellyfin I'll be going with Jellyseer if I decide to stand up this kind of service again.

• Libreddit

  • Rarely made use of it. Nice project, but it's not feasible now for obvious reasons.

• Miniflux

  • Same as FreshRSS, though I'm a big fan of go and rust projects in general so this is the one I'm more keen on re-implementing.

• Tautulli

  • Part of the Plex ecosystem which I abandoned. It was useful software, but unfortunately locked to Plex.

• Unmanic

  • Never really had a use for this, though I thought I would at the time.

• TT-RSS

  • Project is decent but the author is a asshole and very user-hostile, so I dropped it when I retooled my homelab a few years ago.

• Jackett

  • Supplanted with Prowlarr.

• Ombi

  • Same as the reason for dropping Overseerr.

• Neko

  • Did it's job, consumed lots of resources, and no arm64 docker image; though I managed to build my own. Got rid of it when I no longer had a use for the service.

Archival/Documentation:

• Filestash

  • Something about the project rubbed me the wrong way, vague on the details though.

• Shiori

  • Was decent but the lack of updates then subsequent maintainer turnover scared me off. I check in from time to time to see how the project's going.

• Wallabag

  • Ended up being too slow and clunky for me, but that could be the hardware I was running it on at the time.

• Archivebox

  • Same as above, but it definitely wasn't the hardware.

• Bookstack

  • It was alright but decided I didn't need a separate service for documentation, I just use Code-Server with a documentation repo and raneto to give me a pretty page to navigate and for the family.

• Filerun

  • Worked well while I was using it, not a fan of the closed-source nature and just didn't feel the need to redeploy when I retooled my infrastructure.

• Wiki.js

  • Same as bookstack, didn't really have a use for a separate service.

Dashboards:

I'm going to preface this by saying I have some sort of addiction with dashboards, it's unhealthy really.

• Organizr

  • Didn't like how everything was an iframe and it seemed particularly resource heavy for what I needed it to do.

• Heimdall

  • My second dashboard. Liked the API integration not so much the design.

• Homer

  • Wasn't a fan of the design.

• Homarr

  • Also didn't like the design much.

• Flame

  • Decent project, but decided to move on to something configuration file based.

• Sui

  • Liked this one a lot and used for quite a while before homepage lured me away with API widgets.

Infrastructure:

• Apt-cacher-ng

  • Inadvertently made my infrastructure brittle with how I had it implemented. Decided to just rebuild my cluster's cloud image on-demand instead of daily and update my apt distros the old-fashioned way.

• LLDAP

  • Liked this project a lot, but added complexity to my infrastructure that could be more simply achieved other ways.

• OpenLDAP

  • Same as lldap, but more feature rich and thus even more complicated.

• Docker Registry

  • Set-up briefly but found a better use-case with Gitea's integrated package registry which I'd already had deployed.

• Guacamole

  • Used this for a while, but the clipboard situation sucked at the time and I gravitated to just using SSH anyway, and since I have Proxmox on hypervisor duties just used xterm.js or noVNC for console access.

• Watchtower

  • Did it's job but the :latest tag is dangerous to use. I like having change logs, an evaluation environment, and an approval based update workflow so I switched to renovate-bot.

• Netmaker

  • Was a decent option for sure and faster than what I'm using currently in theory, but seemed a little to unnecessarily complicated to keep running for me.

• Netboot.xyz

  • Definitely useful. Will probably redeploy it at some point.

• OpenSSH-Server

  • Supplanted with Wireguard implementation in Tailscale.

• Node-Red

  • Tried it very briefly but N8N fit my use-case better.

I use the wide majority of what I setup, sometimes I end up taking it back down, but you're right that it's a good learning opportunity. Nothing wrong with throwing some stuff up just to check out.

Sometimes things may not be useful for you but may be useful for others as well, if you wanted to share, a music streaming setup could be nice to share with friends.

My usage varies from service to service, but unless I've either found a replacement or completely stopped using it, I keep all of them (including the ones I never really use) ready to go, maybe with the container stopped. So far I've only removed 2 services, both because there were better alternatives for me.

If I see something interesting, I'll note it and try to get it up later. Sometimes the service keeps spitting out errors, in which case I'll just attempt again later if I still find the service to be worthy.

I have an archive folder fool of services I have tried and either failed at or decided I didn't need it -

backup beets bitcoin bitwarden clamav cockpit crypto cryptpad ctop deluge diskover dlna dockly dokuwiki emby firefox guacamole heimdall i2p jellyfin mail mailu minecraft minidlna mylar3 navidrome portainer pxe setiathome smtp ssl-proxy sync todotxt traefik ubooquity vpn wallabag watchtower