I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend
For a real hands off approach take a look at Yunohost or CapRover. Both are very easy installs and will give you a gui to manage your applications and other self-hosted services. It's a great way to dip your toes in. The only difference is that with yunohost, they bundle most of the self-hosted services with their own local-sso implementation, so you only need one login for all your services. This is nice if you want a set it and forget it solution. With CapRover, you basically just have a nice gui to manipulate docker installs, so if you find it a bit too restricting, you could just manipulate the docker installs yourself via command line.
I really like Memos. It's a micro blogging site that is minimal, but has a lot of neat features. I'm using it as a replacement for DayOne's journal app.
And I'll second Veloren. My kids and I are having a blast playing.
You may be way ahead of me on this, but I highly recommend using docker for this endeavor(or podman), as it really allows you to try a lot out without making a mess of your system.
I run pihole, syncthing, and gitea locally(among less interesting things.)
Nextcloud, Bitwarden (vaultwarden is the name of the OSS server), Adguard Home / Pihole and Paperless-NGX might be some things which can have a pretty big impact in your daily life.
pihole/adblock
monero node/support monero network
p2pool/mining pool for monero
wireguard/vpn
Tor relay, i have thought of using an old pc to support Tor
I have two instances of BookStack. A public-facing one for bird stuff, and one for home stuff. I also self-host an instance of Plausible Analytics as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics.
On my 2 raspberry pi's I am running
Pihole,
Pivpn,
Syncthing,
Photoprism,
Unify controller,
Heimdall (webpage that has all my servers....locally accessible, or non local via wireguard connection via pivpn)
Might be more can't remember! Prob more from other suggestions on here over next few days 😂
Plex for music/anime/tv/movies, calibre webserver for ebooks/manga, qbittorrent web+Prowlarr to search for and download content, SyncThing to keep things in sync between my server and desktop, and I'm also file sharing with nicotine++