Self-Hoster 🏡

• Fleet: 2–3 devices · 5–10 TB
• Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Customization & full control
• My MVPs: Jellyfin, Sonarr, Pi-hole, Navidrome, Home Assistant

This survey is going to become our version of Spotify Wrapped isn’t it?

This is the setup I’ve built so far:

I use KonstaKang’s LineageOS Android TV build running on a pi 5: https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi5/LineageOS23-ATV/

No Google play services store at all, I just use ADB to install apps

This is the launcher I use, it’s way nicer than the stock Lineage one: https://github.com/meddouribadis/arclauncher/

I use SmartTube as my YouTube client: https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube/

I have this Bluetooth remote app on my phone for the rare occasion I need to type a password or something: https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.jqssun.btremote

I also have KDE Connect on both my phone and TV so I can play/pause media from my phone at any time and send files (like new launcher wallpapers) easily without adb.

Thank you for your work on this project!

On my homelab I don’t mind so much as I have 64gb of ram and and 8tb of storage, but on my vps I want everything to be relatively lightweight

I would like the option to be able to upload images from a multitude of devices like my phone or even a university PC if necessary. I don’t want to have to worry about setting up public key access on every device I might reasonably want to use.

I’m a developer and have daily driven Linux for nearly 3 years, so I’m beyond familiar with terminal usage, but scp isn’t exactly what I’d call a pleasent or convenient command. Every time I have to use it my immediate mood is ugh >:( not yippee :)

Are you sure you’re subscribing to the correct feed? ListenBrainz gives two different feeds, one is a “weekly(maybe daily?) Mix” consisting of your own music, and another that is recommendations of music it doesn’t know you have.

Occasionally a song I have slips into the latter because it hasn’t been scrobbled yet, but otherwise the recommendations are reasonably good and I’ll decide to grab maybe 30-50% of them

I use Navidrome on the server side

Tempus on Android (maintained fork of Tempo)

Feishin on desktop

I also recently set up music assistant to try and stream my music to my TV too, although I haven’t used it yet beyond just testing and don’t see myself using it too much

I scrobble my Navidrome up to ListenBrainz too, which then gives weekly recommendations to add to my collection.

Does anyone know of an RSS feed for the newsletter? I’ve been trying to use RSS for more stuff recently

I disagree that Nix is a solution in search of a problem, in fact it solves arguably the two biggest problems in software deployment: dependency hell and reproducibility (i.e. the “It works on my machine” problem)

Every package gets access to the exact version of all the dependencies it needs (without needless replication like Flatpaks would have) and sharing a flake to another machine means you can replicate that exact setup and guarantee it will be exactly the same

Containers try to solve the same problems, and succeed to a somewhat decent extent, although with some overhead of course.

I’m not trying to criticize you or your setup at all, if Debian alone works for you, that’s fine. The beauty of open source and self hosting is that we can use whatever tools we want, however we want. I do though think it’s good practice to be aware of what alternatives are out there should our needs change, or should our tools change to no longer align with our needs.

Small setups can very easily turn into large setups without you noticing.

The only bare-metal setup I’d trust to be scaleable is Nix flakes (which I’m actually very interested in migrating to at some point)

Doing this is generally a bad idea, because audio exported from YouTube is pretty poor quality, and music videos often have bits of talking or silence that make sense in context of the video but aren’t part of the actual song (designed to prevent exactly this). There was a cli tool I used last year that could download music from Spotify directly.

Edit: The tool I was talking about is Zotify

Make sure to set the --download-quality flag to very_high if you have premium to ensure it downloads in max quality

If you have long playlists (more than a few hundred songs), you should also use the --skip-previously-downloaded and --song-archive flags as per the docs to make sure you can start again from where you left off, as Spotify will start to rate-limit your connection and downloads will fail (if this happens, just kill the tool, wait a few minutes and start again)

Navidrome can scrobble to ListenBrainz which starts giving you recommendations playlists after a couple of weeks :)

Thanks for the recommendation, it certainly seems like an interesting project, although it’s current capabilities are almost backwards from what I actually want. My current workflow is:

• Listen to my library in Navidrome via Feishin/Tempus
• Scrobble my listens to ListenBrainz
• ListenBrainz generates my weekly recommendations playlist (things not in my library)
• I listen to the playlist on the ListenBrainz site via YouTube embeds
• Any songs I like, I download high quality FLAC files of using slskd by buying legitimately

Just being able to see my recommended songs in Tempus would remove some of the barrier of having to log in to ListenBrainz every week (which I often push to the bottom of my to-do list and end up missing recommendations). I don’t even really need to stream them directly in the app, just being able to see them and open the YouTube link would be a good start.

I get that this might be a bit of a niche way of doing things and everyone will have a slightly different idea though, I don’t really expect my exact personal workflow to be catered for by open source devs.

It might be a bit out of scope (at least for now) but something I’d love to see eventually is the ability to pull down weekly recommendations from ListenBrainz and view them natively in-app. Even if they just linked to the YouTube video, it would make self hosting music feel like it had the last remaining benefits of streaming services.

It supports HDMI CEC so I just use the remote that came with my TV

It’s a little bulkier than a Chromecast but for my TV at home I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with Konstakang’s Android TV LineageOS images installed. It works pretty well and I could see it being fairly portable.

Thank you for your work on this! I switched from Tempo to Tempus after seeing one of these updates a few weeks ago. It’s great to this is being maintained!

• Continually increasing subscription prices
• Ripping off artists
• Introducing AI bullshit
• Blocking explicit songs unless users verify their age with a third party

It sounds to me like one (or more) of your containers is referencing something on your storage drive, but Docker is loading before your drive gets mounted. When Docker sees that the folder its trying to access doesn’t exist, it creates it, blocking your drive from taking that name.

To fix it, you would need to make sure your storage drive is mounted before Docker starts, how you do that is down to you and your particular setup though.

I’ve found Android TV to be the most usable TV OS tbh. I use Konstakang’s LineageOS Android TV 15 image on a Pi 5 which is source available (non commercial only licence). And Projectivy Launcher (closed source but is by an indie dev and better than the stock Google one). The Pi is CEC compatible so I can control it with my TV remote no problem, and I use Moonlight to stream games from my PC.

If you already have hardware, there may be an Android x86 TV release somewhere but I haven’t personally tested any, and you have to make sure the apps you want support x86 (all the open source ones like Jellyfin should)

Edit to add: I also personally haven’t found a need to install GApps as all the apps I use are either open source, or were made to work also on FireTV so don’t rely on GApps APIs. (Use SmartTube instead of YouTube, it’s a better experience anyway)