Kavita and Jellyfin both sold me on self hosting.

I no longer have to worry about transferring my media to every computer, it's accessible now via the web browser which is ideal.

I wanted to host a Minecraft server for some friends, so I got cobbled together a PC out of some spare parts and put Ubuntu server on it. Over time I added an emby server and tools to get media for the emby server and that was good for a few years. Then I moved and had some more space and fell way down the rabbit hole of used enterprise gear.

I got a raspberry pi and some wd red drives when Google photos went for a pay model. We use it to back up our phones and pc, and to run jellyfin and torrents. It's not wildly different from doing things on pc, except it's set it and forget it. Having something always on, reliable, and "just works" makes it worthwhile.

A friend in high school helped me install a counter strike server on linux on an old desktop. From there, I experimented with hosting some forums and an upload script to save files remotely. In the days way before the cloud was a thing. That got me interested enough to start figuring things out and get into it.

Started off with just hosting a permanent Minecraft Server on a Raspberry Pi. Later added stuff like Nextcloud or Calibre Web to it and now it's just a teensy tiny bit out of control (I'm self-hosting a good 2 dozen services now).

I started off hosting UT2004 servers at LAN parties back in the day then Tremulus? servers, then coubter-strike 1.5/1.6/cz. Started learning VPS with CS:S.

Some friends from high school and I were in an Cisco A+ class together. One night we ordered pizza, and after finishing it - we took the larger of the boxes, cleaned it out, and turned it into a server. We ended up running a few different game servers on there with the first being CS:Source, I believe. When that died, I started a 1&1 VPS that ran a Dark Age of Camelot freeshard for a while.

@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org I wrote my own music player, after that I installed PiHole. After that I realized there were much better music players out there :-P

A desire to set up a permanent download station that could extremely securely and very automatically keep track of all the Linux distributions (eg I really want to make sure I try every version of Mint Linux and with various arr programs I could ensure that as soon as a new version of Mint shows up, I automatically download it and get it shown in an interface where I can try the new version of Mint Linux. Linux distributions - I just love them!!