My self hosting journey and breaking the chains of subscriptions

I've always despised the subscription model although I have to admit it was convenient. But as always, with capitalism, the product eats itself and it becomes a monster, a shadow of a better past.

Like it happened with social networks, Spotify, Netflix (and the gazillion other providers), as well as a myriad of products that moved from being a one time purchase to subscription based models; their goal shifted aggressively towards profits and forgot the users.

Privacy is also a concern, I am tired of being spied on by companies and I want the freedom to be able to consume media without my data being sold to anyone and everyone with a buck in their hand.

And on top of all that, the genocide happened, with the complicity of a lot of those companies. That's when I decided to go back to the high seas, but maybe this time with style? Compared to the past anyway, without shady torrents and unreliable direct downloads.

With a low end PC I inherited, a lot of hours, and a bit of knowledge, I can proudly say I am not subscribed to any services right now (except to my union, of course).

Basics

Hardware: Intel Celeron G5905
OS: Debian 6.12
Storage: 5 TB of HDD for media files and 512 GB of SSD for the OS and software
Docker: with docker compose for some of the services that don't have a standalone version

Music services

Navidrome
A music server that allows for streaming of your music from different clients on Windows, Android, iOS and others.
https://www.navidrome.org/

Slskd
A client of Soulseek, to download music.
https://github.com/slskd/slskd

Soulbeet
A download manager that combines beets (a music tagging and organizing tool) with slskd to allow for easy searching and download of music.
https://github.com/terry90/soulbeet

Explo
A music discovery service based on Listenbrainz. Listenbrainz generates playlists based on the music you have listened to and Explo connects to Slskd, downloads them and puts them into Navidrome.
https://github.com/LumePart/Explo

Audiobookshelf
Even though I am not a user of audiobooks, audiobookshelf automatically collects the Podcasts I like and puts them into a Podcast library in Navidrome, I don't have to worry about searching for them on third party websites.
https://audiobookshelf.org/

Music clients

Feishin
This is a spotify like music player for Desktop, it's genuinely amazing.
https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin

Symfonium
A music player for Android, full of features and customization. Although I don't love that it's not FOSS, it's the best music player out there for Android.
https://symfonium.app/

Movies and TV

Jellyfin
A media server for TV shows and movies, it's the server but also the clients for Android and Android TV.
https://jellyfin.org/

Arr stack
The Arr stack allows you to connect media providers (torrent, usenet) to media search engines, this is done with Radarr for movies, Sonarr for TV Shows and Prowlarr for the providers (usenet in my case).
https://github.com/Ravencentric/awesome-arr

I have multiple tmdb lists connected to Radarr for automatic downloading of movies when they are added to those lists.

Nzbget and usenet
I switched from torrenting to usenet a few months ago and I am not going back. Even though usenet is a paid service, I prefer it due to the availability of media. Nzbget is just the client I use for the downloads.
https://nzbget.com/

Usenet can be a little bit daunting when you first discover it but you basically need two things: a provider and an indexer. The provider has the files, the indexer helps you search for them (in a nutshell).

In my case, I use eweka as my provider and nzbfinder as my indexer. If you ever want to purchase services from them, search reddit first, you'll get a big discount.

Other bits and bobs

I have some other services that I use often and others I've used only once or twice.

Homarr
As a homepage with all the links to my apps and stats about my machine.

Forgejo
As an alternative to github where I store all my scripts for the machine.

Picard
Musicbrainz tool to organize music files.

qdirstat
A tool similar to windirstat to visualize space used in your machine

Tailscale
A VPN like service which allows me to connect to my machine from outside of my home without the need of opening ports (I am behind CGNAT). It also allows me to share my library with friends.

Things still pending

Music: as of right now, I have to get used to not listen to playlists generated by Spotify so I'm trying to focus on listening to the wide variety of music currently in my library as well as single albums. I'm not completely used to it yet but I'm getting there.

Movies and TV: Right now my biggest gripe is that the automation I have set up does not allow me to filter by files that have subtitles, which is a must for me. Also, my machine is very basic so transcoding is not a possibility, which means I need to manually search for compatible encoded files. Besides that, I do not love the arr stack, I don't think it's very intuitive and it hasn't brought the best results for my needs. In the future I'd maybe like to develop my own tools for it.

That's about it, if you're thinking of setting up your own self hosted services and need a hand, I'll be glad to help.