Hello everyone!

I recently switched my Android phone to a custom ROM, and while setting things up, I wanted push notifications without relying on Google. That’s how I discovered UnifiedPush.

Really liking the concept, I decided to rent a small VPS (1 vCPU, 2GB RAM) and started hosting NTFY. So far, it’s been working great. Over time, I’ve added a few more services like FreshRSS and Audiobookshelf.

All of this is just for personal use, so the resource usage is minimal (the whole setup only uses around 500MB of RAM). I really enjoy how much value you can get out of such a small machine.

That brings me to my question:

What other lightweight, self-hostable tools would you recommend? I’m especially interested in small, resource-efficient services that you’ve personally found useful.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

  • VeryVito@lemmy.mlEnglish
    77·
    6 days ago

    I feel like the world is sleeping on ForgeJo — it’s such a capable and easily hostable alternative to gitlab/github/bitbucket.

    • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
      23·
      6 days ago

      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, but migration is pretty painless and largely automatic, but there’s no guarantee you can go back. Though I don’t know why you’d want to.

    • iambeingheldhostage@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      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.

    • ntn888@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      just wait till it gets federation… it’ll be the nail in the coffin for github!

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      The CI turned me off though. It’s kike they saw how bad GitHub is for CI and said “no notes. Just like that”

      And I use the CI config a huge amount.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        20·
        6 days ago

        I’m not PC but, one benefit of using a central server for syncthing is an always on backup that doesn’t require another client device to be on, it also allows for easier creation of new shares.

        For example, with syncthing you can set the “servers” client device to auto approve/accept and shares that are to trusted devices, then when you get a new device, instead of needing to add that device to every device you share on the syncthing network, you only need to add that device to the server and then you can have your other clients connect to the servers share instead of device to device. It’s easier. You can also configure the shares on the server to use encryption by default too, since you don’t really ever need to actually see the files on the server since it’s basically a install and forget style client.

      • rem26_art@fedia.io
        9·
        6 days ago

        In addition to what others have said, Syncthing will use public relay servers if it can’t make a direct connection between your devices. Everything is encrypted, so it’s not unsafe or anything as far as i know, but if you want to run your own private Syncthing relay server, you can. (Or run your own public one)

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      There’s also an image for Copyparty if you’re already hosting stuff as containers. It’s super handy.

    • BruisedMoose@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      What’s the flow there? Receive link, copy, open MeTube, paste, download watch?

      Tiktok and Instagram links are so frustrating when friends send them.

    • tofu_oligarch@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Ohh good idea! At some point they stopped sending me videos as I was not able to watch them anyway :( thanks <3

      • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Just checked out Seal. My impression:

        It uses the same backend as MeTube (yt-dlp), so they have the same capability as far as website support and file formats.

        Seal looks like a good option if you don’t have access to your home network or if you don’t have a dedicated machine to host things.

        I still prefer MeTube because it’s a web UI that I can access from any machine. I use a VPN to stay connected to my house so I could still use MeTube while away.

        Is it primarily for iPhone users?

        MeTube is just a web UI, not a phone app. It is accessible by any device that can see the local IP and port of the host machine.

  • yardratianSoma@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    I’m thinking about finding an alternative to ntfy. The maintainers are increasingly vibe coding it.

  • rem26_art@fedia.io
    18·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • pr3d@eviltoast.orgEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      May I can ask what do u use to access the calendar/contacts on mobile and desktop?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.

    • tofu_oligarch@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      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).

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        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.

  • BruisedMoose@piefed.socialEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • tofu_oligarch@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      Thanks! I own an e-reader, but as the stock software has served me well so far, I haven’t had any reason to switch. Is KOReader worth it?

      • BruisedMoose@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        I moved all my books out of Amazon last year and host them for my family with Calibre Web. Jailbroke my Kindle and use KOreader exclusively, so I use Sync so that if I need to read while I’m out, I can just pick up on my phone.

        • tofu_oligarch@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          The chance that I will do anything else but reading when using my phone is big, so the sync maybe not as relevant. That said, using KOReader with a centralized ebook library still sounds really useful. Thanks!

      • offspec@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        My favorite part of koreader is the reading statistics and historical calendar view

  • ApocolypticGopher@infosec.pubEnglish
    9·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      For blogs I found two interesting projects that are super minimal. BashWrite uses only bash and sed commands but it seems to be no longer under development.

      Another bash script that seems to have more development activity is BSSG. This one requires a markdown processor such as cmark or pandoc but it’s still quite minimal.

      I love minimalism and writing scripts so these two projects really interest me.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      I’m in the process of switching from ipfire to opnsense myself.

      I hate how bloaty opnsense is at first glance but it has so much more control so once I copy my current config I’ll be leaving ipfire in the dust.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        21·
        6 days ago

        I think you will be back at Ipfire soon. OPNsense is a confusing mess and while IPfire certainly has its issues, at least it is easy to understand and it does what it is supposed to.

        • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          6 days ago

          yea I have the machine backed up in case this happens. I have noticed that its a mess UI wise. But ipfire doesn’t seem to be stable. every few months it’ll randomly kill itself which will take everything on the network down until i manually restart the machine and then force tell it a new DNS server. It’s something I’ve never managed to resolve on the machine, and I don’t seem to have that issue with my test network with OPNsense.

    • tofu_oligarch@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    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.