Tangentially-related, I'm actually really excited to use Threads's federation with Mastodon to bring interested friends and family over to Mastodon. If you get all the same benefits (connection, more people) with none of the ads or privacy downsides, then it seems like a no-brainer to join Mastodon over Threads.

But to answer the question, no. I run my own Mastodon (and Lemmy) server. I'm kind of all-in on the fediverse.

https://simplelogin.io/ - they're now owned by Protonmail, I think, and the service is still great. I have hundreds of alias e-mails with them on a custom domain and they're as permanent as you want them to be. You can also use their domains to be more anonymous if you want.

But also kind of with Disney stuff, too

I decided to pull the trigger when I was on sh.it just.works and Beehaw defederated them and Lemmy.world. I immediately couldn’t see posts from the super active beehaw communities even though I didn’t do anything. Realized it kind of did matter which instance you chose.

Totally never going to run a community on here, but at least I can see everything now, I can keep my post history, and if I get defederated it’s probably because I messed something up with my server

For me it was always a challenge to keep everything up-to-date. I couldn't check weekly or w/e because it just felt like a time suck to go to a dozen different sites, so I would let things languish.

I started putting the github releases pages of all my services in a special "updates" category on Miniflux . You can get a feed by appending the releases page with ".atom" (e.g. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases.atom for Lemmy) and then just get notifications whenever they're updated.

That + Watchtower for non-critical Docker containers and everything stays up-to-date.

Yeah, it’s definitely annoying, but if it’s any consolation, it’s a system-wide problem. Not sure if/when/how they fix, but if this place is going to be a long term Reddit replacement, I feel like they’re going to have to.

I feel like this one needs to be higher up. It so immediately and instantly changes your browsing experience (especially on a phone), that I VPN into my own home network when I’m out just to stay on the PiHole.

Plus, when you get further along in your selfhosting journey you can use the custom DNS to re-route domain names so you never need to leave your network to use your own services.

Proxmox Backup Server. It's life-changing. I back up every night and I can't tell you the number of times I've completely messed something up only to revert it in a matter of minutes to the nightly backup. You need a separate machine running it--something that kept me from doing it for the longest time--but it is 100% worth it.

I back that up to Backblaze B2 (using Duplicati currently, but I'm going to switch to Kopia), but thankfully I haven't had to use that, yet.

Kids growing up today will never know the pure awe of going in a Blockbuster Video and playing Mario64 on a Nintendo 64 store demo for the first time. It was absolutely amazing.

I'm an older millennial and I've played a lot of cool games. Nothing comes close to that, though.

lol I was the same way. I went from not being able to see just beehaw to spotty federation with many other instances (oddly enough beehaw and the kbin instances are nearly perfect), so I'm not yet sure if it was an upgrade.

Yeah, I’ve been selfhosting for nearly a decade and setting up lemmy was, surprisingly, a challenge, and not because it was all that difficult but because the documentation was contradictory, out-of-date, or non-existent in key areas. Federation is my current hurdle, too. It would be nice to have a place to compare notes. Maybe here?

DNS challenge, that way you don't have to have anything open to the outside. It needs to be using a domain you own and have registered, though.

Here's a tutorial with (seemingly) all the DNS providers: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/dnsapi

You can use sendgrid to send your emails. That gets around the port 25 problem, but everyone is right - you’ll have a difficult time getting through spam filters even with them.

I selfhost my own email mainly so I don’t have to go through the Google unsecured apps rigamarole every time I want to set up smtp for one of my services, but no one except protonmail gets it reliably.

I think it's possible to have false-positives. Like [email protected] said above, do a clear and scrub to see if that helps. It happened to me last month after some really intensive disk i/o and AI stuff and I did that and the drive hasn't had an issue since.

Additionally, I plugged in one of my old, supposedly faulted drives from last year as an external drive on my desktop to test it out, and it is still working fine months later, so yeah, it appears that there is some possibility for false-positives.

Like another person said, make sure you have good backups and that the other drives are solid, but I'd take a wait-and-see approach.

Wow, good job for the generations of your family, having a name that would one day be a TLD. Some awesome foresight, there.

Definitely a trade off between energy and security. I have PBS running on an old laptop backed up to Backblaze and wouldn’t change it for anything, though. Proxmox backups are flawless and have saved me so many times. But yeah, 16GB of RAM with that processor is overkill for PBS and will probably consume more energy than is needed.

If everything is Dockerized anyway, you could just skip the step where you backup to PBS and use something like Kopia to backup your Docker volumes to a network share or offsite, rebuilding with compose or whatever if you have an issue.

PBS only backs up the VMs and containers, not the host. That being said, the Proxmox host is super-easy to install and the VMs and containers all carry over, even if you, for example, botch an upgrade (ask me how I know...)

I'm not super familiar with how snapshots work, but that seems like a good solution. As I remember, what pushed me to PBS was the ability to make incremental backups to keep them from eating up storage space, which I'm not sure is possible with just the snapshots in Proxmox. I could be wrong, though.