+1 for Frigate, because it’s fantastic.

But don’t bother on an essentially depreciated google product, and skip the coral.

The devs have added the same functionality on the GPU side, and if you’ve got a gpu (and, well, you do, because OpenVino supports intel iGPUs) just use that instead and save the money on a coral for something more useful.

In my case, I’ve both used a coral AND openvino on a coffee lake igpu, and uh, if anything, the igpu was about 20% faster inference times.

I’d argue perhaps the opposite: if you want full moderation and admin freedom, running it on your own instance is the only way to do it.

If you run it on someone else’s server, you’re subject to someone else’s rules and whims.

Granted, I have zero reason to think the admins of any of those listed instances would do anything objectionable, but that’s today: who knows what happens six months or a year or two years from now.

Though, as soon as you start adding stuff to your personal instance, you’re biting off more maintenance and babysitting since you assumably want your stuff to be up 100% of the time to serve your communities, so that’s certainly something to consider.

You can find reasonably stable and easy to manage software for everything you listed.

I know this is horribly unpopular around here, but you should, if you want to go this route, look at Nextcloud. It 's a monolithic mess of PHP, but it’s also stable, tested, used and trusted in production, and doesn’t have a history of lighting user data on fire.

It also doesn’t really change dramatically, because again, it’s used by actual businesses in actual production, so changes are slow (maybe too slow) and methodical.

The common complaints around performance and the mobile clients are all valid, but if neither of those really cause you issues then it’s a really easy way to handle cloud document storage, organization, photos, notes, calendars, contacts, etc. It’s essentially (with a little tweaking) the entire gSuite, but self-hosted.

That said, you still need to babysit it, and babysit your data. Backups are a must, and you’re responsible for doing them and testing them. That last part is actually important: a backup that doesn’t have regular tests to make sure they can be restored from aren’t backups they’re just thoughts and prayers sitting somewhere.

There’s a ton of commercial/locked-behind-patreon stuff, usually around things like RPG scenery or figures and such.

Like, an immense library of shit that’s not free.