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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!

Forgejo, pihole, freshrss, baikal, mealie, wg-easy, searxng

Pihole again, Vaultwarden, forgejo, syncthing

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Favourite? Probably Kavita.

I’m looking to sell Forgejo next myself

I have never thought of doing this. That’s now going on my server.

do you already have monitoring solution for your vps? maybe prometheus/altermanager and the node_exporter?

otherwise i join the forgejo praise, and also enjoy etherpad.

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.

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.

Thanks for the suggestions. Are you happy with the search results and UX of SearxNG?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #182 for this comm, first seen 21st Mar 2026, 16:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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).

My favorite as well.

I enjoy gotosocial, its such a lightweight fediverse server

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?

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

I made a solar powered phone server. It was great!

Does it work well with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.? Or do you still have separate accounts there?

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.

Thanks! I thought Syncthing does not use central servers? Whats the benefit of using one?

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.

Oh cool! So like an android phone running services? What did you manage to get running?

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.

No, so far I just hope nothing breaks :) will take a look!

With so many recommendations in this thread, Forgejo must be great. I’ve used it with Codeberg, but self-hosting seems a lot better (especially if they introduce federation at some point).

Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

Yup very. I get better search results every time

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

Just a nginx server. And it would show the cirrent battery. I had plans for other stuff, but the pixel 6a is a fire hazzard. And its too hot now for cells outside (almost 100 today). So it got decommisioned.

Now theres a meshtastic node connected tp the splar panels.

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.

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)

Grist

I know use spreadsheets for just about everything

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 35KB of RAM.

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.

KOReader is great, basically swiss army knife, you can configure everything. Not the most intuitive UI though.

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.

I did not know that. Thanks for explaining!

Sounds interesting. Thanks!

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!

Reminds me a bit of the webserver on a vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

Supporting the network with a node is honorable work too :)

Lovely! Thanks for the suggestion <3

ErsatzTV 🫡

2nd time I’m hearing about this service today. How’s the experience?

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.

Nice. Haven’t tried IpFire but gonna give it a look. Been on OpnSense for a couple years now and have been enjoying it.

I love forgejo!

Heads up, ersatzTV is no longer being developed.

Well now you’ve got me trying BSSG :p

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).

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.

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

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.

Any advantages over using Seal for Android? Is it primarily for iPhone users?

Yeah… I think the salute emoji might be Apple specific… I was trying for a respectful goodbye and a war metaphor seems appropriate given its name.

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.

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

Ha. Heard. I mostly don’t want to carry another device when I travel for work, so will use my phone to read.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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

Luna looks promising. Haven’t tried it out yet though.

do you mean there is a known upcoming change in signal?

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.

Points at the general political situation in the US…

Small Update:

I set up Radicale as a replacement for EteSync (as it seems development has stalled, and I am paying for the VPS anyway) and so far it works great. Getting a “shared” calendar to work with symlinks was not that intuitive in a Podman setup, but I got it to work. Thanks for the suggestion!