Perforated galvanized plumbers strapping. While most of my equipment is wall mountable, I used exactly this sort of thing for all the power supplies.

Likely similar to whatever you’re planning to use with the plastic strap, but more metal is more betterer

There’s a button in settings to not show bot accounts. I clicked it when I realized how many posts were just reddit mirror bots

Imaging software is a godsend for that sort of thing. I ended up using BartPE for something like that, and it worked great – it has a free imaging program on it. You only need a removable drive large enough for all your files since it’ll compress everything.

I have a feeling you’d end up with a bunch of big drives with small volumes on them if it did work.

Warning you, I’ve had issues with RAID combining SSD and HDD. Basically I was on an older dell server and I wanted to do mirroring and the bios straight up refused to do it because it didn’t want to mix ssds and hdds.

Is it bad that I saw a new domain name and was like “ooh, a new instance to federate with!”?

Wordpress has had an activitypub plugin for years, in part because it’s an open source project.

I can see why a company with so many separate products like Meta would want to look at federation, but I’m not so sure about Tumblr. Part of their value is in having a walled garden so you need to join them and see advertising from them.

I’ve bought a few dozen of these things, shame to see them go.

For small instances, strong captcha and applications and email verification are sort of important. I know my fbxl video was constantly growing until I realized they were all fake users. Just adding email verification meant that most user creation stopped immediately in its tracks

A quarter million users and that’s not even with all the different instances.

Very cool. Just remember folks, don’t forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.

Gotta admit, young me got a lot wrong about what my future held. I’m glad he was wrong, because life wouldn’t be that great if he was right about everything. :P

In an allegorical sense, start dressing for the job you want.

Part of that would be getting some project management training, but also start acting like a leader to Junior developers. Instead of just focusing on getting the job done, focus on helping them become better developers. Being in management is partially about being in meetings, but it’s also partially about growing your talent and building relationships with your team and your customers. That’s going to do one of two things, either it’s going to prepare you to move up in the company that you’re in right now or it will give you some ammunition to go for the job that you want in another company.

I’ve been self-hosting a wide variety of things including nextcloud (which is one open source project I advocate everyone look at, especially on a web domain so they can access it from anywhere)

Go linux for hosting your open source projects. Just do it. I’m not saying that because windows is inherently worse than linux, but because everything out there is documented as if you’re hosting off of linux. In fact, you should really consider using Ubuntu-server, because most things have documentation specifically for ubuntu.

Going with windows server as mostly just s hyper-v box with your linux installations inside, that might be worthwhile.

If your IP address appears static, then you can probably just directly configure dns through the web interface of your domain provider. There’s a great script out there for doing dynamic dns using different providers such as godaddy, that could be some insurance to make sure you don’t end up with a non-working social media network.

One thing you should consider is running one virtual host as your reverse proxy that redirects different subdomains to the different individual servers running your services. The reverse proxy server running something like nginx would then deal with all your subdomains, and if you work on say your nextcloud and need to reboot it won’t take all your services down at once because your reverse proxy continues to function for all your other services.

A self-hosted ebook solution would be nice. It’s surprising the holes in kindle even tbh

In practice, don’t be surprised if most of the fediverse doesn’t defederate from either.

I say it all the time: decentralization is strength.

America has a lot of problems right now leading to exceptionally low trust in government, even for them.

They’ve done a lot of stupid things lately, but this isn’t one of them.

Governments should be using open platforms and open source software.

I believe it can be, but what I’ve found in general with respect to my fediverse journey is that pretty much everything is built for Linux. If you want to use windows, you’ll likely have to blaze a trail for yourself.

I had one windows PC in my server farm initially, but installed Linux after I realized most things I wanted to run really wanted me to be running Linux.

Decentralize anyway. Make an instance with blackjack and hookers and run it exactly how you want.

I found mxroute, it works very well for me. I can’t say much about specific features since I just wanted a simple email host.