I heard a story about a therapist that used RPGs as a tool to diagnose patients. They held group sessions with several patients and then had a private session with each of them to debrief.
I'm convinced a lot of things can reflect on the way people play and make up their character.
I'd say more than 10 years now. Computers evolved a lot more between the 90s and the 00s than between the 00s and now, my old laptop is 10 years old and it's still perfectly running linux, and I hope it will keep running for years.
The problem is more hardware obsolescence, it's a Acer so every part of it is slowly falling apart (keyboard, screen, battery) and OEM parts are impossible to find after all those years. I guess this problem is less important for desktop.
I do run Piped locally for my family's use, it seems that it works better than public instances but I haven't really measured to what extent (except for ping, which is obviously excellent at 4ms).
I would say that the problem with self-hosting for private use is limited privacy, as the benefits of grouping multiple users behind the same proxy are lost. I try to mitigate this by routing all piped traffic through a VPN though.
Is that really a thing? I've seen it in a few job offers but I have trouble understanding how it works...
As I understand it you can take as many days as you want and it works on the company's trust, but that system sounds really toxic to me, isn't it?
Edit: I'm European with almost 7 weeks off a year for context