I feel like the world is sleeping on ForgeJo — it’s such a capable and easily hostable alternative to gitlab/github/bitbucket.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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It's literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can't imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.
Gitea's okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I've hitched my wagon there and couldn't be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, so it seems like direct migration is no longer possible. That said, git repositories are git repositories, and they have most of the important history and stuff inside them already, so unless you're super attached to stuff like issues and whatever you can still migrate, you'll just lose some stuff.
Huge shout-out to Forgejo. It's blazingly fast, even on low resource devices. Throw it on a Raspberry Pi and chuck it in a closet. I betcha it would have better uptime/reliability than GitHub.
just wait till it gets federation.. it'll be the nail in the coffin for github!
I love forgejo!
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MeTube, for when my friends send me a video on a service I don't use (facebook, instagram, tiktok). It supports a lot of sites.
I have metube configured to download into a directory that jellyfin watches as a library, organized in folders by the channel name and then prefixed with the publish date. It works so insanely well and it makes it so easy to watch videos with friends.
What's the flow there? Receive link, copy, open MeTube, paste, download watch?
Tiktok and Instagram links are so frustrating when friends send them.
Yeah, that's about it. You can watch it directly in the browser as well.
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Possibly underrated: CopyParty. Its an entire fileserver in a little over 1 MB. You can host it on anything that runs python and the client can be anything with a browser. It's unbelievably simple and efficient. If I knew self hosting was this easy I would have started sooner.
There's also an image for Copyparty if you're already hosting stuff as containers. It's super handy.
glance averages around 20MB of RAM per day on my home server. Others have mentioned syncthing, which is also very light on resources, and super useful.
I'm thinking about finding an alternative to ntfy. The maintainers are increasingly vibe coding it.
If you have a need for Calendar or To-dos, Radicale is a nice CalDAV/CardDAV server that's pretty tiny. For me its sitting there at idle using 35MB of RAM.
Radicale - I ditched Nextcloud for it as no-one needed to see a calendar, it's on their phone...
I also use it to sync a calendar for Home Assistant too
And it effectively backs up my Contacts too.
May I can ask what do u use to access the calendar/contacts on mobile and desktop?
Mobile: Fossify Calendar with DavX5 as the interface (both from FDroid)
Laptop: Vivaldi's built-in Calendar
Tablets around the house: Home Assitant's calendar (I don't recall the specific integration, but it was a HACS one from memory)
XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.
Nice! I think XMPP is the best approach to messaging, as it is decentralized and can be E2E (and more mature than e.g. Matrix). The problem is that I won't be able to convince anyone I know to use XMPP (Signal was a huge struggle already).
For now you can use XMPP with the Slidge Signal gateway. At some point there will be an issue with Signal due to their centralized servers in the US and then you will be happy to not depend on it so much.
do you mean there is a known upcoming change in signal?
Points at the general political situation in the US...
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KOreader Sync if you use KOreader. Easily pick up where you leave off on other devices!
I also run Wiki.js to (inconsistently) document what I'm doing with my apps and server.
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I found https://github.com/TwiN/gatus recently and its been a welcomed alternative to UptimeKuma (I have many hosts I monitor, so having a configuration file makes it far easier).
I run a Prometheus server at work, for doing ICMP latency checks, thats all I need at home. Gatus is super simple for my needs.
Low-footprint services are are great I have been using Shaarli for bookmarks for quite a while it never failed me, and is very easy on server resources ~50Mb of RAM
Small static websites. You can get surprisingly performant and easily managed websites if you don't actually need the overhead of common frameworks. For instance giving your kid a real domain they can update and show to their friends.
On the slightly more resource intensive side, OpnSense has been a game changer for me.
I’m a big fan of static site generators. For the websites I maintain, switching from WordPress to Hugo reduced my workload a lot.
I set up a workflow using DecapCMS + Hugo + GitHub. Non-technical users can log in via GitHub to edit content on the CMS, and GitHub Actions automatically builds and deploys the site via SFTP.
GitHub is kinda meh, but it’s low-cost and gets the job done.
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I enjoy gotosocial, its such a lightweight fediverse server
Does it work well with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.? Or do you still have separate accounts there?
It works with most fediverse platforms (its in beta still, but gonna come out of beta soon!) not so much with lemmy as its more so microblogging
Sounds interesting. Thanks!
I used to use Nextcloud and put files in there instead of Google Drive. That’s ok, but turns out, way more than I need. I use Nephele with the Owlfiles app now. It’s less resource intensive. Also, I can manage actual folders on my server. I have a simlink to my Jellyfin media folder and manage it from there.
ErsatzTV 🫡
2nd time I'm hearing about this service today. How's the experience?
Does sshd count?
Beyond the "default" stuff, I always seem to end up with a setup that involves linux + apache + mod_perl + postgresql for various purposes. And by the way, that's the only proper LAMP stack in my book, and I will die on this hill.
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