I’d say to start with CF tunnels unless you need non-web based applications. Cloudflare tunnels require you to have a domain, though.

It has the added benefit that you have network monitoring, logging and some filtering for security that they do on top and you get to manage everything from their web interface.

be warned that the first time can be a bit confusing, but since it’s done using their web interface it’s easier than if you have a problem making wireguard work.

1. Create a tunnel with a public hostname that will be the url to access that service. During the creation of the hostname specify you want it protected by L7 application firewall.
2. Create a new self-hosted application in cloudflare application section and for starters use the default login email and in rules specify the list of emails that are allowed to login

you should now be able to access your application from anywhere.

Alternatively, if you have a DNS server in your home network you can add a private IP range to your tunnel. Let’s say 192.168.0.0/24. Then when you connect with their pseudo-VPN (cloudflare warp or cloudflare ONE) you can directly use your home network’s ip address from that device. If you tell your device to use a local DNS server that resolves your internal services, you’ll be able to connect to them that way.

Joplin I think, or Trillium but that one could be less user friendly.

Install proxmox on a computer with plenty of RAM and CPU and you’ll be able to create VMs which you can give out or rent out to anyone.

In regards to access, ipv4 is not a good idea. Especially not residential IP addresses., You should get ipv6 addresses maybe from a tunnelbroker. But anyways, first you need the server with the hypervisor (which is what you’re looking for) and then you can slowly run tests, learn and eventually figure out networking.

Btw, it might be cheaper to simply rent a server, which would solve the issue of ip addresses. OVH has cheap servers and a proxmox install wizard.

Just please don’t use it for anything sensitive until you can find someone to give a quick check up in regards to security to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Unlike a regular PC, this one is expected to receive inbound connections which has its risks.

But don’t worry about that too much now. Find an old computer or rent a server, install proxmox and start testing, playing around and learning.

Edit: chatgpt is good when wanting to learn this stuff. Especially gpt-4, but even gpt-3.5 will do. Just don’t trust it blindly as it still messes up about 20% of the time. But it’s often better than googling for tutorials since you can’t often find what you’re looking for.

Edit2: the setup I propose will allow you to divide a regular computer into 100s of virtual ones limited only by the total RAM, disk and CPU. If you only want a web server on dedicated hardware get a raspberry pi, because my proposal would be overkill. But it’s the closest to “being your own cloud provider”.

Am curious. Are you able to run a modern windows 10 virtual machine / virtualbox vm on XP?

Not that instance, but Lemmy is missing a lot of moderation and federation tools. Right now you only have sledgehammers to deal with tiny nails, in regards to tooling.

A good decision.

Good point. I think that might be it actually. This could be the reason.

It should be safe as long as you put in a valid timestamp and not some other value. If you run a large instance, then you run the risk of pseudo-DDoSing yourself by sending a large amount of requests to dead servers, but unless you’re a large instance you shouldn’t have to worry about that.

That seems to be the case more or less. In my case times go from 0:00 to 0:25 or so when it finishes.

Check out the Onyx Boox which might cost a bit more but run a version of Android.

In theory that’s what Lemmy now does every day, but I have no idea why it fails to update some instances sometimes. Instances which are very much alive at 12AM which is when this gets executed.

Do you know if you had any cronjob running close to 0:00 (server time, possibly UTC) that could have interfered with the validation of dead instances that lemmy now does?

I’m trying to figure out what could have interfered with these checks in the first place.

It only works for new posts. Try creating something new in a community that you know lemmy.world knows about.

Older posts may appear progressively, but there’s no guarantees.

Yes. That should fix it. There is instances that are genuinely down. Later today I’ll try to share a script to detect which ones are down and which aren’t via curl. In our case we had 350+ false positives.

Hey, this happened to us recently. In your database check the table called 'instance ’ and make sure the value for ‘updated’ is less than three days old for lemmy.world

There are false positives regarding the detection of “dead instances” in the latest version of Lemmy and it’s actually your instance that stops sending out messages to lemmy.world

It’s probably trolls. Best thing you can do is report them. I talked to their admin once and they seemed nice.

Sorry for the late reply. If you’re interested in music, you could give both javascript or C# a try. C# works integrated with the operating system and is not sandboxed by the browser, which means that you could do nifty things like actual sound processing and interact with sound devices etc.

In general you will want to start with a console application that receives user input, does something and even prints the output. Let me give you an example of playing an audio file in C#

LINE 1: System.Media.SoundPlayer myAudioPlayer = new System.Media.SoundPlayer(@"c:\mywavfile.wav");

LINE 2: myAudioPlayer.Play();

In the first line we are calling a pre-existing blueprint (library) that knows how to create an audio player. This blueprint can be located in System > Media > SoundPlayer within the collections of libraries. We are giving this virtual audio player a name and called it “myAudioPlayer”. Then, after the “=” sign we are giving it the instruction to be created with a preloaded file that would be found in “C:\mywavfile.wav”.

In the second file we are commanding our newly created virtual audio player and telling it to play the file. Please note that this audio player would not have a visual interface yet. You would hear audio coming from the speakers but no way to pause. Fortunately C# / .NET (.NET are the pre-existing libraries that you can use), has a drag-and-drop way to create windows application interfaces with buttons via the “Visual Studio” editor, so you could potentially create a drag-and-drop interface and bind a button with a Stop symbol to the instruction “myAudioPlayer.Stop();”

This is just a very very basic example, but object oriented programming often boils down to this: create virtual representations of something and then command them to do something.

If this has peaked your interest check out this playlist of a full complete programming course in C# which is what I used to learn programming years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAcMO3d9_E&list=PLFqasLx4-AErVMCWiIyJe9uA3yQMPBukG

In the end it’s all about creating a series of instructions that the computer will follow. The trick is to learn what these instructions mean and to not be scared by their syntax, because behind every scary looking syntax there’s just an instruction that can be explain in human language.

Oh yeah, apologies for the above comment. C# is definitely a good option, especially if you use windows and love messing around with the OS

I’m not sure I fully agree with that approach for most people since C++ resources and tools seem to not be the user friendliest but then again if it worked for you that is amazing.

Try “the Odin project”, which has an amazingly active community.

But before you try too much, once you’ve learned to set up any programming tools, just use them to have fun. Find a way in which you can use programming in relation to your hobbies.

With JavaScript you can manipulate any webpage you see or create your own interactive webapp. Even if it’s just a few ugly buttons and text fields, you could make an app that calculates good builds for a videogame you like, for example.

If you want to interact with a windows operating system you can’t go wrong with C# using visual studio. This will literally allow you to manipulate files, folders or automate anything you want from the operating system.

Try to find something that is fun and just enjoy yourself with small apps before you try to go too fast.