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 think the issue is that people nowadays have come to expect a certain degree of individualized feeds and discovery features.

There is probably plenty of content on mastodon that would be of interest to any given user, but the discoverability is kind of lacking - especially if you are used to Twitter’s algorithmic feed.

Germany feddit.dk

.dk is Denmark. feddit.de is the German one.

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.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what first came to my mind when I heard about threads planning to federate. I think it is a huge risk.