Hey Everyone!

I’m new to this whole Lemmy/SLRPNK.net world. However I am a seasoned old-timer when it comes to having a computer constantly on in the corner of my house doing things. I came to visit this community and thought I’d throw my 2c out here for any potential new people who come snooping around.

In the world of self-hosting, there are like 100 things you can do, everything from a smart home, to a multiple rack mount server setup. I am here to introduce any new people to a concept that I think should be getting more attention. After I heard about the spike in new sign up’s after Netflix pulled their no-password sharing shenanigans, I thought hey, people must not know that this is an option. Self-hosting a media server might be the most simple, yet biggest rebellion against this culture of constant targeted consumption.

Yes yes, I know that most of you long time nerds have had home servers for years, but what about the people who don’t?

So… What is it?

Think of Netflix, except you get to decide what is on it. No fees, no rules, no taking things off. You can watch stuff from your phone on the train, or even get your mother-in-law that show she’s been struggling to find.

How can I have all these cool things at my fingertips? Well, you’ll need two things.

1. A home server of some kind. If you already have one, excellent! If not, this is unfortunately not a guide on how to get started with self hosting, but a raspberry pie (or one of the alternatives, rockpie, pine64,orangepi) or any old computer, yes even a laptop, is a fine place to start. Give it the OS the manufacturer recommends. If you want more than that,I am sure the many lovely members of this community would love to help you out.

2. A media server software.PLEX, Emby, or Jellyfin are your “real” options. Plex is robust, mostly free, and constantly gets updates. Emby is a fork of plex that happened before the devs started to get greedy and make a premium tier. Jellyfin is the fully free open-source alternative. All three will have apps for your smart TV, or phone. (although plex supports the most, eg xbox, playstaion, Samsung tv, lg tv’s, android and ios)

Now that you have your server, follow the setup guide given by your app of choice, and put some media on your server. You can use a USB, or some kind of remote connection to do this.

Where do you get your media?

Most Blueray or DVD purchases will give you a code inside to get a digital download. Personally, I have no issues with encouraging you to sail the high seas. However for those wanting to walk the straight and narrow, many libraries offer the ability to rip VHS content to digital… and well, CD/DVD drives aren’t hard to find.

Now run yourself a bath, grab some wine, and watch that obscure 1990’s anime in peace, knowing that no woke or conservative mob will every be able to stop you from enjoying jiggle physics Dragon Ball.

  •  middlemuddle   ( @middlemuddle@beehaw.org ) English
    4•1 year ago

    Not the point of your post, but any chance you could point me in the right direction for RSS feeds? What RSS feeds do you use and how do you get that data served to you? I get the general idea of RSS, but I’m not really sure how to incorporate it in my world now that I’m trying to move away from reddit.

    •  matt   ( @matt@infosec.pub ) English
      2•1 year ago

      No worries at all! So I use Miniflux as my RSS reader but there TONS of different ones – some open source, some freemium, some premium and closed source. Even VLC and Thunderbird can be used for keeping track of RSS feeds! For that front, I’d just search and give a couple a try – find which one suits your needs best. I used FreshRSS before making the switch to Miniflux but there are hosted options like Feedly.

      In terms of finding things to read via RSS, you’ve got a ton of options there too! There’s a lot of open RSS feeds out there that just aren’t advertised. A few that I have are:

      • I think all youtube channels (stackoverflow post) have the option for RSS. You can go about it the way outlined in that post but I’ve found using https://youtube[.]com/channel/CHANNEL_NAME_HERE is good enough if I want to sub to every video of a channel
      • A lot of smaller blogs – most wordpress sites actually have a default rss feed that gets created unless you actively disable it
      • Substack news letters/blogs for folks that I follow have this support built in
      • I actually found out yesterday how to subscribe to both my Lemmy inbox and all the subscribed communities that I’m in to get those over RSS (there’s a little RSS feed icon next to the drop down filters for the latter)
      • I use hnrss for hackernews since they don’t have a direct rss feed you can subscribe to. Lobste.rs at least does have the ability to subscribe to multiple “subreddits”/“communities”/what have you and be able to filter things out – otherwise it gets really noisy
      • There’s a couple of folks that I follow on Twitter via Nitter that supports RSS (how to guide but since bird site is such a cess pool, might reconsider some of these.
      • I live in a fire prone area so I also subscribe to some of NOAA’s RSS feeds in case my family needs to evacuate
      • You can even pull various subreddits over rss if you’re still using reddit for somethings. The one thing that I loved about using these rss feeds is that you could group subreddits together into one rss feed and just have that but I imagine this will change with the API changes
      • This doesn’t even include all the podcasts since the way they’re distributed is built on-top of RSS feeds!

      The one big problem with RSS is that there really isn’t a good way to find other RSS feeds – or at least I haven’t found a good way, ha! Typically, I’ll get linked to a site from hackernews, lobsters, here, wherever. If I like their stuff, I’ll just paste their URL into Miniflux to see if they have an RSS feed and subscribe from there. I really wish that there was a recommendation list of good rss feeds but honestly, sometimes the best way is word of mouth? Hope this helps!

      Edit: Put brackets around the youtube link so that it doesn’t turn into an actual link