inamin

as a newcomer to all things federated (I skipped mastodon as I never used twitter), the best piece of advice I have is to not overthink the whole federation idea. Just sign up with an instance or two (I signed up to kbin.social and lemmy.world). See which instance format suits you best. You will (should) be able to interact with all other communities/magazines etc. I started off liking the interface of kbin more, but find myself using lemmy.world. Just start searching for communities, find ones with decent userbases and start interacting. Feel free to down this to oblivion if I have the wrong take on this!

oh hey! It was $670 australian dollars, with no ram, no hdd, no wifi. so bare bones. this was back in October 2021. It’s now a fair bit cheaper. This is the aliexpress link if interested. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003331392517.html?spm=a2g0s.12269583.0.0.60c06558Sa8ykB

• plex (on its way out) (media)

• jellyfin (not yet migrated across) (media)

• vault warden (password manager)

• nextcloud (photo storage, secondary to one drive)

• home assistant (smart home hub controller thing) vault warden is actually hosted in a container in home assistant.

• nginx pm (proxy manager)

• octoprint also sits on the server (3d print server)

all run under proxmox in a variety of containers and vms. hardware is a ryzen 5 something mini PC from aliexpress with 32gb ram, 2 * 1tb nvme hdd in zfs raid for vms. It’s fast, and silent, and cheap to run.

on an old hp n40l microserver I run unraid with a deluge container for torrents. the unraid hosts the storage for plex/jellyfin/nextcloud.

am amazed at the stability of it all. it just works!

i’m loving it - even the rawness of it - eg kbin grinding at the moment - it feels like you’re a part of the development. my only concern is what happens where there are multiple large communities/magazines/whatever.your.instance.calls.it. Say there’s a !funny@lemmy and a !funny@kbin. would be great if these could be aggregated together some how. There could be a lot of duplication across communities. Or will one rise supreme and the others dwindle to nothingness? who knows.