Home Server - This article is part of a series.
Now that I have a (relatively) stable home server, it is time for me to think about what services I actually want to utilize. My goal with my home server is not to become entirely self dependent, as I know you are always reliant upon a third party to have availability. My goal is simply to maintain more control over my data and to avoid being locked into expensive service bills that could go up at any time.
The lowest-hanging fruit of services to replace are Google services. Many people use them, so the pool of people who want to get off them is larger. This has resulted in a more mature FOSS ecosystem to replace their services. For example, Immich is a Google Photos replacement that has close to feature parity. Nextcloud can replace functionality of Google Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc. Google News can be replaced (partially) by an RSS reader like FreshRSS.
While I am aiming to replace the services provided to me by big tech companies, I am also interested in providing myself with new functionality for things like document managment, web archiving, shortlink/file sharing, recipe digitalization, etc. The lists are a mostly-complete picture of what services I want to replace or implement in my homelab. An excellent motivation for services to utilize is Awesome-Selfhosted.
Various google services I’ve used that I’d like to replace (as much as possible) include:
- Keep
- Photos
- Maps
- Sheets
- Docs
- Drive
- YouTube
- News
- Search
Other services I’d like to replace are:
- Archive.is (For an explanation why, read this. TL;DR, one of the largest web archives has been directing a DDOS attack against a security researcher and also has a history of modifying webpage content.)
- Giftster
- Link shorteners
Some services I’d like to add are:
- Recipe Indexing/Recommendation
- Task tracking
- Password Managment
- Document Managment
- File Sending
- Home Security System
- Budget Tracking (with automatic bank Syncing)
