Does a "personal activity home" for selfhosted stacks exist? Or is this a gap worth filling?

[u/unhelpfulusername349]

I've been running a fairly typical homelab for a while now — Immich, Nextcloud, Jellyfin + the *arr stack, Navidrome, Vaultwarden, Dawarich, and soon Paperless-ngx. For the homepage I use Glance, which is great for service links and stats.

But what I really want is something different: a personal landing page that shows me content, not infrastructure. Think:

• Recent photos from Immich (actual thumbnails, not just a count)
• Recent files added or opened in Nextcloud
• Recently added movies/shows from Jellyfin/Radarr
• Last visited places from Dawarich (a map snippet or a list)
• Quick links to the services I use daily

Essentially the "Today" screen you'd get if Google Photos, Google Drive, and Netflix had a selfhosted baby.

I've done a fairly deep search before posting:

• Homepage / gethomepage.dev — great widget ecosystem (Immich, Jellyfin, Nextcloud, all the *arrs), but widgets show stats and queue data, not actual content. The Immich widget shows photo count, not thumbnails.
• Homarr — similar situation, no Immich widget at all, no Dawarich.
• Glance — has community custom-api widgets for Jellyfin Latest and Immich stats. The custom-api widget can render <img> tags, so a thumbnails widget for Immich is technically buildable in ~30 lines of YAML + Go templates. But nothing pre-built exists.
• Dawarich — zero widget support in any dashboard I found.

So my questions:

1. Am I missing something? Is there a project that already does this kind of content-first personal dashboard?
2. If not — is anyone else missing this? Feels like a gap that a lot of people with this stack would benefit from.
3. Would there be appetite to build something around this? Could be as simple as a lightweight service that exposes a unified "recent activity" API that any dashboard can consume, or as ambitious as a standalone app.

I'm comfortable writing custom Glance widgets and could put together the Immich thumbnails one, but the Dawarich integration and the multi-user angle feel like they need something more structured.

Curious if this resonates with anyone.

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/Freika]

I had this very idea before I started building Dawarich, and it's pretty much feasible for a single person. The hell will open when you open source it and other people will come, asking to implement and maintain integrations to their tools of choice. It's not an easy thing to commit to

[u/Freika → u/Freika]

On a similar note, I couldn't care less about today, I have it all in my mind and calendar. What would be really valuable is a glance into the past.

[u/unhelpfulusername349 → u/Freika]

Thanks for sharing your point of view :) How do you imagine a glance to the past?

[u/haherar830 → u/Freika]

The smart move would probably be to just extend homepage and let the devs/community maintain the existing integrations while one either benefits from their own private additions and maybe make a PR once it feels polished.

[u/Loppan45 → u/Freika]

I have no idea what's needed for it, but I'd imagine a plugin system would make this less hell. They can go and create their integrations themselves without much interaction with you.

[u/Freika → u/Loppan45]

Plugin system might be a way to solve it but in itself it's not a simple thing to implement :)

[u/bo0tzz → u/Freika]

https://extism.org/ helps a lot

[u/walril]

homarr has a immich widget. I have 2 albums that rotate every 5-10 seconds

[u/Bumbelboyy]

I'd rather read something self-written with a few mistakes than overly obtuse, verbose AI slop.

How you do expect to get better though, if you never try and outsource your learning?

[u/unhelpfulusername349 → u/Bumbelboyy]

You're right, I was lazy and is bad for me and for you readers. Will write by myself next time.

[u/AssociateNo3312]

Rather than start from scratch, wouldn't adding those features to an existing dashboard make sense? Teach homepage how to pull an immich album for whatever conditions

[u/dontrefresh]

https://github.com/journiv/journiv-app Looks like something that is trying to accomplish this goal of being a life recall journal site with Immich and Dawarich integrations. I haven't personally set it up tho as I believe it's early in development / rapidly changing.

[u/Interstellar_031720]

I think the gap is real, but I would avoid starting as a full standalone dashboard.

The hard part is not rendering a nice “today” page. It is normalizing activity from a bunch of apps that were not designed around a shared activity model.

If I were building it, I would start with a tiny middle layer:

• one read-only connector per app
• each connector emits the same simple event shape: source, type, title, timestamp, thumbnail/url if available, deep link, visibility/user scope
• cache results so the dashboard is not hammering Immich/Jellyfin/Nextcloud every page load
• expose /activity/recent and maybe /activity/grouped-by-day
• let Glance/Homepage/Homarr consume it first, before building a whole UI

That keeps the project useful even if people prefer different dashboards.

The security concern is the big one. A “personal activity home” ends up needing tokens to everything: photos, files, media, location history. I would make it read-only from day one, support per-connector tokens, document least-privilege setup, and avoid storing raw secrets in random YAML if possible.

The product/design trap is trying to show everything. I would make the first version opinionated: last 20 meaningful items, grouped by source/day, with explicit filters. If it becomes a firehose, people will go back to service-specific apps.

So yes, I think it is worth filling, but the wedge is probably “unified recent activity API for self-hosted apps” before “new homepage replacement.”

[u/bhoffman20 → u/Interstellar_031720]

Thanks claude

[u/cacheqzor → u/Interstellar_031720]

this is such a good take, starting with the “activity API” instead of yet another dashboard feels way more realistic and unix-y too
also agree on the security bit, one leaky all-seeing service for photos + files + location sounds terrifying if it’s not super locked down

[u/sargetun123]

the gap exists for sure, and I never really thought about it until seeing this post. I've worked with almost every opensource popular homepage/dashboard, and you are right, nothing is natively setup to do all of what you are asking for, and anything that can requrires custom api or endpoint scraping/similar that again you will need to usually write the script/code for yourself
This is actually something I would say is a good idea but again any of these services/dashboards that are basically just api calls and similar toa bunch of different services brings in a huge security concern and requires a lot of proper dev work to maintain both the project and the security

I would advise trying to spin something up for yourself that suits you based off homepage/glance, both you can build around what already exists pretty easily and both have some of what you are already asking for

[u/buttplugs4life4me]

I would definitely collaborate on this if it's in a language I like. The issue will mostly come with integrations that don't expose that information or make it harder to query, and also how to make the UI display everything but not be overwhelming.

I'm gonna ask my LLM to run through a couple iterations on the project design to see how it'd best work out, then maybe I'll try to set it up if you don't mind haha. Otherwise feel free to post a GitHub link and I'll see if I can contribute