Not true. I self host my music, which is what got me into homelabbing in the first place. I have 7 months+ playtime of music, and a pipeline for finding new recommended content with it. And i get the benefit of not having my music removed when license deals expire or never existed. And my random play actually randomizes instead of whatever profit optimized engine Spotify pretends to be “random” playing, so I actually hear new stuff. And I have playlists that can have more than 10k songs, but I dont even need those because I have smart playlists, including ones set up to only play things i havent ever listened to. I wouldnt ever go back

Terraria hit a good spot for me. Was minecraft with things to actually discover underground. Can get to be more action-y when you do the bosses and such… but overall the game was magical just digging endlessly in a direction to see what weird stuff came up.

But my top tier is heavily modded Bethesda games. The vanilla games are… fine… but the moddability really opens up to make it what you want. Id layer on hundreds of mods, some survival, some just cool additions like a mod that might make autumn leaves fall from certain trees, or add nature sounds throughout the whole world, mods to make your character get tired the more they run so you have to set up camp in a safe spot every so often, spells require components so you have to learn the native plantlife to know which to scavenge for, that kind of thing. You use the mediocre quests the base game gives you as a reason to start traveling in a direction, but you end up setting up camp in the wilderness staring at the stars outside a random castle ruin you found that you might explore in the morning. It requires a good bit of willpower to set up the mods how you like em, but there’s nothing like it once you do.

Wabbajack is a project nowadays that let’s you clone super stable modlists. Might find some good baselines through that. I wouldn’t know… I got down the modding rabbit hole a decade ago and havent gotten out to actually play in ages.

There’s a game called Eastshade that I might play sometime that looks like skyrim exploration… but instead of quest being combat, they’re instead quests to paint various scenes across the land. Seems like a quality wanderlust game. Haven’t yet played though

7 Days to Die is another one that requires some elbow grease. It’s a pretty shitty zombie Sim game that devolves into silly base defense every 7 days with waves of zombies and turrets and stupid pit traps, etc. But I installed a mod called Undead Legacy, tweaked the spawn/difficulty settings to my liking, and installing a custom worldgen instead of using the base map, and then played it on ironman mode where I literally restarted if I ever died. It was pretty janky, but somehow magical. Exploring through the wilderness, scouting out towns and scavenging for supplies, taking everything leisurely/slow and methodical so I didn’t get myself killed. Ended up being very calming but paranoid wanderlust feel with spikes of adrenaline survival. I want to give project zomboid a go sometime for the same feel/goals

That’s my problem, though, no one’s truly made a perfect wanderlust game… so I’ve always had to twist games that are close to my liking. I think the wanderlust genre is a bit of a personal genre in that way. The ambience and various dials need to be just right for you as an individual to truly lock in and get lost in it. And it almost always takes some mentality shifts on your part too. Not fast traveling, maybe even just walking slowly and smelling the flowers, etc. But its nice to have a compelling game ecosystem around that too.

Sure, but i need -some- content. Can’t just be caves with a toothless zombie poking its head out every so often. If you want just beautiful scenery and no actual gameplay might as well go play “Prologue: Go Wayback”

I love exploration games where wanderlust is the main hook, but even I need more than Minecraft offered on that front. It needs some unexpected things to show up periodically to keep it fresh and dispell the procedural stink.

Try playing with the mod Rampant with extra water to make a more mazey map. Deathworld settings if you can/want. It changes the mentality away from spreadsheet megabase optimization minmaxxing to instead be tower defense “slap something together and get it done, soldier!”.

Makes it way more enjoyable for me as it gets rid of the perfection mentality and beings it back to being a game again. Things dont need to be perfect, and if you try to do so the bugs will just punish your fiddling by smashing your base. You gotta do things well enough to work but at a pace fast enough to stay alive. Whole different game. Way more fun, imo.

I recently played a game with Rampant PLUS a mod called Bobs/Angels that makes the recipes more convoluted and hard. Was an amazing time. Here is the end base after 250 hrs in all its messy glory

24/7 there was hordes of bugs assaulting the walls with crazy abilities. If a train didn’t pull up with bullets every few minutes the walls crumble

Terraria is the Minecraft that’s meant to be played. Actually has dungeon crawling and a world to experience. Minecraft is just 3D Microsoft Paint that decides to chase your cursor with a zombie every so often.

Yeah, will not work for everything. Things with actual phone/TV apps generally dont like it. That being said, it still helps for a large swath of my setup

I’ve had good success spinning up an authentik instance, and having my reverse proxy hit it first before it routes to the actual app. Puts another security layer in front in case sonarr itself has an issue, for ex.

Caddy snippet

handle {$host} {
		route {
			# always forward outpost path to actual outpost
			reverse_proxy /outpost.goauthentik.io/* authentik-server-1:9000

			# forward authentication to outpost
			forward_auth authentik-server-1:9000 {
				uri /outpost.goauthentik.io/auth/caddy

				# capitalization of the headers is important, otherwise they will be empty
				copy_headers X-Authentik-Username X-Authentik-Groups X-Authentik-Entitlements X-Authentik-Email X-Authentik-Name X-Authentik-Uid X-Authentik-Jwt X-Authentik-Meta-Jwks X-Authentik-Meta-Outpost X-Authentik-Meta-Provider X-Authentik-Meta-App X-Authentik-Meta-Version
			}
			
			reverse_proxy {this_host_or_ip}:{this_port}
		}
}

Not gonna solve all your problems. Works for 70% of apps. Nice to slap on when you can.

You can download playlists just fine. I’ll go on vacation all the time and listen offline the whole time.

And you dont need to run a server on each device. Plexamp and/or Symphonium are just apps for your phone. It’s all “local” when the laptop with the server/music and your phone are in your own house, especially navidrome. If you want to hit that server on the internet, thats a homelab project to dip your toes into when you feel like it.

Try out smart playlists. Plex, navidrome, etc. Let’s you set up a list that will only play songs you havent heard in months

Eh, dont agree. Yeah, I think listening to a whole album is important on occasion and can give a cool perspective. But I’ve found that the range of things I enjoy increases with shuffle. There’s so much stuff that I love… in unexpected short spurts. Im not talking hits, but just random decent stuff. I think there’s something lost when an album has to be good enough that you intentionally pull it off the shelf and listen to it for an hour. Hordes of cool things won’t meet that level.

Niri is crazy good. I get itchy without it now

• havent figured out how to rate well when driving. Definitely a PITA.
• i considered skipped counts a bit, but ultimately felt it would end up hiding songs that were good but required me to be in a specific mood to appreciate. I wanted to be the judge of if something was good and feel free to skip good things when I felt like it.
• another thing my suite was missing was the new music discovery story. Made a personal app myself to fill that gap, but would love to see a more robust community solution someday. Maybe ill give it a proper dev pass someday and publish

Star ratings and smart playlists! Oh my! I love this stuff. Im currently using plex, which allows for half stars since im a masochist

I dont know that I need the full ten options, but 5 wasn’t quite enough for me. If there was like 7 star system id do that, hah.

• 0.5 - I would delete if other people weren’t listening to the library. Never play again
• 1 - on my shitlist. Unless something changes, will probably go to 0.5 stars the next time I hear it.
• 1.5 to 2 - Not opposed, but forgettable or slightly not my style
• 2.5 - average content. Not memorable but fine
• 3 - solid content, still not memorable
• 3.5 - the good stuff. I’ll put it on a solo car ride and generally not skip
• 4 - Amazing songs. If I was to put a Playlist on for other people and not worry about it
• 4.5 - Favorite songs. Maybe a fault or two but will still stay with me for a lifetime
• 5 - Id play these for anyone without hesitation and then look at them and say “was that not perfection?!”

For smart playlists:

• playlists by star rating
  • alts for excluding facemelting stuff to play in public
• Car ride - 3.5 stars and up + havent heard in a month
• “Frontier” playlist. Only play things i havent heard in a year that aren’t 0.5 stars

I generally listen to my frontier Playlist and try to rate as I go. Other playlists for when im listening but busy and just want the good stuff.

I havent found a good way to tag on the go, unfortunately. Maybe someday

I use pangolin as the front, which checks in with Authentik as the SSO before it lets anyone through to the actual apps. Pangolin itself acts a bit like my reverse proxy so my caddy takes a back seat and isnt used for too much. Pangolin comes with crowdsec as well.

Sounds great in theory, but I always feel bad transforming my data too much so I can no longer seed, hah. Maybe someday

Posted in a similar thread

My baseline is a public VPS with Pangolin/Crowdsec installed. I have authentik as a login system. Pangolin let’s me put authentik in front of any service so they have to log into it before it gets to the service in question whatsoever. This is different than the app itself just using Authentik as the OIDC provider. Helps give a bit of peace of mind with the services which themselves might not be security focused. Also, these pangolin routes are able to block anything outside my country by rules, so that trims a good portion of attacks as well.

Some things don’t like that authentik layer in front though. Audiobookshelf’s phone app for example cant handle it. For that, I route those domains through cloudflare tunnels. Their tunnels do a good job blocking lots of attacks, so not having authentik in front is more acceptable.

But then there’s jellyfin that doesnt want to be on cloudflare tunnels and doesnt want authentik in front. For that, I just have it on my pangolin side with only crowdsec helping. Not ideal, but best I can do without making my grandma install a VPN on a raspberry pi in so her TV can connect or some shit.

And lastly, I have some private services like forgejo that don’t like authentik in front and only I myself care about. I tailscale to those rather than exposing sometimes.

What youre talking about is having an app refer to authentik to find out who a user is.

Internet -> audiobookshelf -> asks authentik who it is

In addition to that, you can set pangolin up so that it doesnt even hit that app in the first place at all unless the user is already signed into authentik.

Internet -> pangolin makes user log into authentik before forwarding along -> audiobookshelf -> asks authentik who it is

So if the app in question has a security vulnerability, its not a problem because no one even gets to the app at all to begin to try to exploit it unless they’ve logged into authentik first.

My baseline is a public VPS with Pangolin/Crowdsec installed. I have authentik as a login system. Pangolin let’s me put authentik in front of any service so they have to log in hit before the service in question. Helps give a bit of peace of mind with the services which themselves might not be security focused. Also, these pangolin routes are able to block anything outside my country by rules, so that trims a good portion of attacks as well.

Some things don’t like that authentik layer in front though. Audiobookshelf’s phone app for example cant handle it. For that, I route those domains through cloudflare tunnels. Their tunnels do a good job blocking lots of attacks, so not having authentik in front is more acceptable.

But then there’s jellyfin that doesnt want to be on cloudflare tunnels and doesnt want authentik in front. For that, I just have it on my pangolin side with only crowdsec helping. Not ideal, but best I can do without making my grandma install a VPN on a raspberry pi in so her TV can connect or some shit.

And lastly, I have some private services like forgejo that don’t like authentik in front and only I myself care about. I tailscale to those rather than exposing sometimes.

Only other thing I think I need to add sometime is some VLAN separations?

Solidarity. New people are being forced to deal with this enshittification wave. We may be immune to it (for now), but the more people involved and excited about the alternative the better it’ll be. Yeah, I got mine… but we can also be involved in something better.

I think the thing is, every news cycle there IS a few people who’s time has come. And so jellyfin is brought up

I say this as someone who has a plex lifetime and is still using plex. I appreciate everyone getting riled up and passionate, because that means the fallback will be that much more polished when my time comes.

You sound like someone pulling up the ladder and yelling at the people below to shut up. Anyone new to the space is dealing with this absurd $750 lifetime price. Of course they’re yelling