Hey r/minilab! 👋

We're the ZimaSpace Team! You may know us better through ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube. We build personal servers and operating systems for people who love tinkering and self-hosting, making it easier to host your own services as part of everyday life.

Over the years, we've watched self-hosting culture grow into something incredibly diverse and active. Maybe it's time it had a day of its own.

So this year, together with r/minilab and a group of excellent self-hosting projects, we're launching the very first Self-Hosting Day 2026. We hope that, starting this year, September 25 can gradually become a day that belongs to the self-hosting community.

We'd love for you to share your setup, your journey, and your experiences, so more people can see what self-hosting can make possible and maybe find a reason to try it themselves.

Just share your self-hosting story in the comments below to join.

📅 Self-Hosting Day: September 25
🎉 Event Period: September 25 – October 25
🏆 Winners Announced: October 30, 2026 (EDT)

🤝 Meet the Self-Hosting Day Partners

Self-Hosting Day belongs to the whole community. A huge thank-you to the r/minilab mods for organizing this together with us, and to everyone here for giving us a place to meet, exchange ideas, and share what we're building.

We're also honored to have AdGuard, Emby, PhotoPrism, OpenClaw, Karakeep, and Blinko joining us. Some of these names may already be part of your setup. Others might become your next discovery.

AdGuard
AdGuard helps block annoying ads and online tracking, protect your devices from malicious content, and make browsing faster, safer, and cleaner. Beyond your home network, AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN, and Private AdGuard DNS can also help protect the devices you take with you.

Emby
Emby organizes your movies, music, photos, and live TV, then streams them from your personal server to the screens and devices you use every day.

PhotoPrism
PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, privacy-first app for self-hosted photo and video management. With smart search, automatic classification, face recognition, maps, and broad media format support, it makes large libraries easier to organize and explore on your own server.

OpenClaw
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent project built around privacy, model freedom, and local-first use. It lets users choose their own models and tools while keeping their data, and the technology they rely on, under their control.

Karakeep
Karakeep is a self-hostable "bookmark-everything" app for saving links, notes, images, and PDFs. AI-powered tagging, summaries, and fast search make it easier to organize what you save and actually find it again later.

Blinko
Blinko is an open-source note-taking project designed for quickly capturing and organizing ideas, helping you save thoughts the moment inspiration strikes.

Together, these projects, and everyone reading this post, show just how many different things self-hosting can make possible.

Now we'd love to hear your self-hosting story.

🎉 Join In!

Just leave a comment below. There's no fixed template and no "right" kind of story. We want to hear about your real self-hosting experience.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few ideas:

• Your setup: Tell us about your Mini PC, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or server rack. Photos and screenshots are welcome too!
• The apps you use: What self-hosted apps do you rely on every day?
• Your journey: Tell us about moving away from cloud services, lessons learned the hard way, or something you've been building recently.
• Your everyday life: How has self-hosting changed the way you, or your family, use technology?

Whether you've just built your first setup or have been tinkering for years, we'd love to hear your story.

🎁 Awards & Giveaways

To make the first Self-Hosting Day even more fun, we've teamed up with our partners to prepare plenty of prizes for the community.

Whether you share a story that inspires others, get a little lucky, or simply join early, there's a chance to walk away with something.

🏆 Community Story Awards

Together with the r/minilab mods, we'll select 5 winners from eligible entries, considering authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Here's what each winner will receive:

🥇 1st Prize × 1

• 1 × ZimaBoard 2 1664
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🥈 2nd Prize × 2

• 1 × ZimaBoard 2 832
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🥉 3rd Prize × 2

• 1 × ZimaBlade 7700 with power supply
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🍀 Lucky Giveaway

We'll also randomly draw 100 winners from eligible participants who haven't won a Community Story Award. Each winner will receive one of the following software licenses:

• 35 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Personal · 1 Year
• 35 × AdGuard VPN · 1 Year
• 25 × Private AdGuard DNS · 1 Year
• 5 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🎁 Early Bird Treat

It pays to be early! The first 100 participants to submit eligible entries, based on comment timestamps, will each receive:

1 × ZimaOS Plus Lifetime License

A special thank you to AdGuard, Emby, and PhotoPrism for supporting the first Self-Hosting Day and providing these generous prizes for the community! ❤️

📋 Event Rules

Joining is simple:

• Share a real self-hosting story in the comments of this post between September 25 and October 25.
• Each person may submit one eligible entry. If you post multiple entries, only the earliest eligible one will count.
• Spam, plagiarism, duplicate content, mass AI-generated submissions, and purely promotional content are not eligible.
• Community Story Awards will be judged based on authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Upvotes may be considered as a sign of community interest, but they are not the only judging factor.

🏆 All winners will be announced on r/minilab on October 30, 2026.

For the full event rules, prize redemption details, and shipping information, please visit: the Self-Hosting Day 2026 event page.

❤️ A Day for the Self-Hosting Community

More than anything, we hope Self-Hosting Day brings us together to share what we've learned, discover hidden gems, and meet fellow self-hosters.

Spot a clever setup in the comments below? Ask how they got it running! See someone taking their first self-hosting steps? Recommend an app you can't live without. Know a simpler way to get something working? Pass it along!

A huge thank you to the r/minilab mods, AdGuard, Emby, PhotoPrism, OpenClaw, Karakeep, and Blinko for believing in this idea and bringing the first Self-Hosting Day to life with us.

The comment section is all yours. We can't wait to read your stories!

Best,

r/minilab & ZimaSpace

Woo, achievement unlocked!


Somewhere between "Hey, this Pi-hole thing sounds cool" and "why do I own a six-node Proxmox mini PC cluster," 100,000 of you decided that this little corner of the internet was worth subscribing to. One hundred thousand humans/bots/one suspiciously articulate NAS who collectively looked at oft-overlooked hardware and had their homelab Goldilocks moment.

How did we get here? YOU.

Every shared "it's not pretty but it works" SBC NAS/media server tucked behind a TV. Every 3D-printed rack ear that took forty-two revisions to get right triumphantly presented to the sub. Every posted "this is my minilab" with enough RGB to make a full 42U server rack blush. But especially every time someone helped an internet stranger figure out why their VLANs weren't VLANning or pointed them in the right direction. The civility of this place is astounding.

This community went from a speculative handful of people posting their builds, testing the waters for a niche homelab group to a place that became the community nexus for a mini-revolution. The project, support & mentions from creators like Patrick, Jeff and Tim really lit a fuse under the membership growth that hasn't yet slowed down. This in turn has opened doors for vendors, such as our friends at GL.iNet & IceWhale to offer some fantastic giveaways in this sub - all because you have built a community worth showing up for.

And thanks to our sister/cousin subs across reddit for the reciprocal linking and general acceptance of /r/minilab as a new kid on the block. It's great to be a part of a wider community.

None of that stuff happens for a dead subreddit. Vendors don't knock on the door of a community that isn't engaged. Creators don't shout out a sub that doesn't give them something interesting to look at. You did that.

By the (approximate, unscientific, possibly made up) numbers:**

• ~100,140 members who think "mini" is a feature, not a limitation
• ~230 new friends we just haven't met yet joining every day
• ~270 new posts a month
• ~3.5k comments a month
• Average "what mini PC should I buy?" posts per day: Yes
• ~700k visits a month - massive!

What's next? Same thing we do every night, Pinky!

Seriously though—whether you joined yesterday or you're one of the OGs, here since the sub was smaller than the chance of securing a mini PC with a PCIe slot, thanks for making this place what it is. It's your builds, your questions, your cursed cable management, and your willingness to help strangers on the internet that got us here.

If you've got any suggestions, thoughts or fun ideas, please feel free to share them. It would be remiss of me not to highlight our two current giveaways - check them out, the odds are still fantastic!

• GL.iNet x DeskPi: https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/1qspthq/glinet_deskpi_13_chances_to_win/

• IceWhale's ZimaOS & ZimaBoard: https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/1qx55xv/zimaboard_2_giveaway_zimaos_feedback_share_your/

Thank you one and all again. May your minilab adventures be fruitful and continue to inspire us all!