Self-Hosting

Most important of the movement was to switch my cloud storage provider from Dropbox to Nextcloud. While Dropbox was giving a lot of storage (2 TB) in their subscription, I realized most of the data kept there were passive and didn't need regular access. Now with Nextcloud on a DigitalOcean instance, I am able to work with a < 200GB block storage while moving my archival data to physical Hard Drives that I keep separately.

While starting this I was wondering if I should set up a NAS but that was unnecessarily expensive and overkill. Just separating data in active—internet accessible, on Nextcloud—and passive—backup and archive, directly on physical drives—was good enough.

The next big source of data for me are personal photos and videos from phones and other camera. Here I migrated from Dropbox photos to immich. Immich is a really solid piece of software with all the features that you would expect from a modern photo management tool.

Other than this, I maintain a PeerTube instance for uploading videos, screencasts, etc. to share on social media or my blog.

For notes, I have been using Org-Roam along with a custom Android application since last year. The Org files here are synced across devices using Nextcloud.

I used to maintain bookmarks on Raindrop.io but I moved that to Org-Roam too which works well with the Android Org-Roam workflow.

For feeds, I was earlier using elfeed but this wasn't working great across devices. This made me move to a combination of FreshRSS, ReadYou, and Newsflash which has been a huge upgrade.

Some time back I switched from Org Mode for task management to Todoist since Org didn't have a solid task management centered mobile application. Now, Todoist is a really good product and it was hard to find a system that could beat it and justify the cost of switching.

Then I found that CalDAV on Nextcloud with the right tools can actually get very close to what I want. This needed some leap of faith but I was able to basically have Todoist like workflow without any major disruption in my mental model.

Since I don't have that much background in—and don't want to spend a ton of time in—setting up services safely on the cloud, I ended up relying on Cosmos Cloud to handle the logistics for me on a DigitalOcean machine. I have, in the past, attempted using a few other tools but Cosmos has been thoroughly impressive. In the future, other than moving to actual on-premise setup, I am also keen to explore something like PikaPods which seems very reasonable and cheap.

Inevitably, I also ended up setting up a dashboard.

Here are a few other changes, not all of which are related to self-hosting:

1. Stopped using Google and switched to Kagi Search. I was skeptical of this in the beginning. But right from day one, I have never felt like I am missing anything. Simple features like prioritizing and pinning a website, along with more modern features like LLM powered quick answer provide a significant upgrade to Google search.
2. Started using a paid VPN.
3. I was using a managed version of Monica which I moved to my own instance.
4. Set up Flarum for Google Group like discussions for a few groups that I am planning to run, but this hasn't been in much use as of now.
5. A lot of other tools that I was using from Google cloud have alternatives in Nextcloud. This includes an office suite along with video and audio call tool. With tools like DAVx5 and Fossify suite hooked on Nextcloud, I was able to replace all of what I used to rely on Google for.
6. Hosted n8n as an alternative to IFTTT as I find it really handy to connect a lot of tools together via a no-code system.

There are still a few things that I haven't been able to move away from and will be thinking about in coming months:

1. Music and media subscription: I am still using Spotify, Nextflix, etc.
2. IM: Most of my connections are on WhatsApp and it's just hard to move everyone. With my partner we tried using peer to peer tools, self-hosted ones like Element, and privacy preserving alternatives like Signal, but the experience is not comparable to popular tools like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. It's a little disappointing.
3. Code Hosting: I still use GitHub. I wonder if I am using this for having a programmer's profile or actual git hosting. It seems more like the former but I still have to make up my mind to decide how to take this forward.
4. Web Analytics: I use managed Plausible for my website analytics. While I am planning to move to self-hosted version, I think this can happen a little later too.

In any case, I have finally moved past the initial friction around self-hosting and it's been surprisingly easier than I thought.