I got into self-hosting quite by accident. I had just started on Mastodon when I saw somebody posted about self-hosting and Cloudflare tunnels. I went to their blog, followed the guides, and next thing I knew I had a fully functioning Mastodon docker instance. From there I began wondering about other ActivityPub services were out there. In January I get rid of the Cloudflare tunnel and stood up a free Oracle VPS.
I created a wireguard tunnel between my home server and my VPS. I then installed nginx on the VPS as a reverse proxy. I've been hooked ever since. I moved my blog to hosting at home. I stood up a Lemmy instance. Next move is standing up a BookWyrm one. I am in now hooked.
I really want to host my own email but I've been rightly disuaded from doing so because the Big Bois don't play well with small email servers, even ones that have been correctly and sanely configured.
A good step towards redemption is moving social media outside of the sphere of corporate influence and into the decentralized hands of individual people and small groups. Projects like Mastodon, Akkoma, Lemmy, Kbin, Friendica, and Pixelfed are making the internet an exciting place to be again. I hope this tide also works against Big Email because corporate influence over who gets to send email to them that does not go to spam and who's does is arbitrary and there's no recourse.
This is a highly subjective question. For me personally, it has been cats. Some people prefer reptiles. It very much depends upon the individual person.
That's a shame but good to know. It was only a matter of time before capitalism realized that the quality was too good and people weren't buying them frequently enough.
The moon is a dead place. We have a living earth. Why are we spending money on space when our home is literally on fire and burning. Let's make our home a great place to live.
Okay, I will give it a try again.