Pretty much, yes. - Shodan user

Not surprising. We’re in a gold rush for AI and Nvidia is selling shovels.

I’m using a thinclient (Fujitsu S920), slapped an Intel Pro/1000 NIC in there and installed opnsense. Hardware cost for both used was around €80. Wifi is handled by a TP-Link access point.

It’s a big boy router/firewall, and it’s been quite a learning experience but very fun.

Yeah, I’m not so sure either.
I mostly just played around with it because some application I was testing relied on s3 storage and Minio was the best selfhosted project I could find that was s3 compatible. Worked pretty well, from what I can remember.

I can’t help with the whole connection between the VPS and your home server bit, but Minio is probably what you’re looking for when it comes to selfhosted object storage.

I was going to mention it-tools. It’s great!
And if you need more stuff in a similar vein, cyberchef is also pretty neat.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away?

One aspect is that federation is definitely a bit harder to wrap your head around technically.

But I think another large contributor is the fact that culturally, the zoomers never really grew up with things like independent forums. I’m 33 and back in t the day it was very common for me to be signed up to many different forums for my different interests. Over time, I’ve seen the centralization of those communities, forums shut down and centralized services like Reddit, and lately Discord took their place.
I remember a time when the internet wasn’t solely controlled by a handful of organisations, I can see the value in federated systems. But someone who only knows centralized services and walled gardens is likely to fear the wild, or at least won’t value it as much.

//edit: Another thing to keep in mind, is that it’s just very common for this demographic to be early adopters for tech products and platforms. I remember when Twitter started, and a large part of its early user base was people in their 30s or older who were very into tech, or journalists. The reason I started using Twitter towards the end of the 2000s was because most of the podcast hosts and regular contributors on the TWiT network were using it.
Seems to me that if you want to launch a social media platform, your early adopters are either guys who are into tech and in their 30s and 40s or teenage girls.

I’ve been very happy with mxroute for quite a few years now. They have a summer deal going on for $40 a year for unlimited domains and accounts, you’re only limited by storage (100GB) and outgoing emails per hour.
t would be helpful to know what you consider basic features you want the host to support, but catchall works.

Unless I’m actively looking for a specific type of application, or to replace one I already run, I just check in on the subreddit periodically, just looking at the top posts from the past month or so.
I guess I’ll start checking in on lemmy now.

There was a time, where I was checking for new stuff to selfhost almost daily. But at this point, I have what I want, and there is no point in trying to change a running system.

The biggest reason is that PWA allows for web push notifications.
iOS is pretty strict when it comes to background apps keeping open connections, that’s one of the reasons why there is no gotify app on iOS. They list the possible workaround with apple’s APN service, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of selfhosting,

I’m afraid the biggest obstacle would be Apple’s strict restrictions on background services. We cannot keep a persistent WebSocket connection in the background without abusing some APIs, which will absolutely disqualify the app from going onto the App Store and drain the battery significantly. Notifications could only be delivered through APN, which requires a developer account and a central server to manage notifications and send them to Apple before reaching the user, but this is not what gotify is designed for.

https://github.com/gotify/server/issues/87#issuecomment-457453135

//edit: If you check the ntfy docs, you’ll see that instant delivery is not supported on iOS. So if you have uses that are time-sensitive, PWA with web push definitely has the advantage.