• Pihole (if that service goes down, everyone in my house gets mad at me)
• Jellyfin

Everything else is a nice to have, not essential

The arr family with a torrent client is great for feeding Jellyfin. If you are a developer, you can host your own shit there too. Game servers for playing with family and friends (so far Minecraft, Terraria, Project Zomboid, V Rising). I like to host a bunch of different telegram bots I wrote for fun. Discord bots are another interesting side. I also run some automation runners for helping out with testing, building and deploying my projects.

Focus on your needs and what you want to improve of your online life, there is probably a project you can self host for it.

Gamevault: To share Games with my friend's especially modded games. Jellyfin: Sharring Movies/Series/Music Immich: Saving my Pictures Pi-Hole + Unbound: Ad-blocking

Gitea, wger, jellyfin, samba, *arr stack, jellyseer

Omada software controller handles my wireless access points. HomeBridge lets me control various things from my iPhone, without having to use 5 poorly-made apps.

@bpt11 headscale is high on my list, since it enables everything else I host to be behind a tailscale VPN.

Radicale for calendar, tasks & contacts
Syncthing for file sync
FreshRSS is the best I've found for RSS
Jellyfin for media
Audiobookshelf for audiobooks (but really more for podcasts, in my case)

Zim + syncthing + mega

XBev 4thud EE

Essentials? Difficult to decide, it depends on why you are even selfhosting in the first place.

At a first glance and looking at my attempt at a homelab:

• some sort of basic web service (eg.: nginx + PHP setup)
• some sort of repo manager service (I do Fossil, but I hear most people use eg.: Gitea)
• XMPP server
• Jellyfin server
• Minetest server

Arr stack, Jellyfin, and Nextcloud + some dashboard.

For me:

• Card/CalDAV baikal : so that I can sync my calendar and address book across phone, tablet, workstation, and laptop
• Messaging prosody/synapse : private chatting with family.
• File sync Nextcloud : for access to various files. This is the only one that has worked consistently for me. Syncthing et al would constantly lose connection and the file I needed wouldn't be there. Works fantastic for syncing Joplin notes.
• VPN wireguard : to access things remotely and securely
• Audiobooks audiobooksheld : I have a ridiculously large audio book library and enjoy listening to them when driving. This way I don't have to preload my phone.
• Ebooks calibreweb : another large library. I have separate instances for different types: Magazines, regular books, RPG/gamebooks.
• Version control forgejo : for coding and creative writing projects.
• bookmarks shaarli : I find myself using this less and less. I use Firefox's built-in sync, so I'm thinking about switching to separating selfhosting that instead of shaarli.
• Photos Synology : looking forward to immich getting stable. Once they get past regular breathing changes I'll move over to that.

I have stopped using most of the services that got me into selfhosting. Things like rss and wikis. I try new things from time to time but kill them if I don't find myself using them regularly or if the maintenance cost is more than the value add.