I have a small self-hosted Nextcloud with Nextcloud Chat and it can do video though it isn't great. Jitsi Meet is much better but I haven't tried to host it myself. I'm sure there are other options too, though idk what to suggest. Maybe see what's around on Scriptaculous these days?
The software part is easy. The hassles are more in dealing with abuse, ddos attacks, inappropriate content, etc. Hosting can also get expensive if usage gets high enough. But, things like this have been done plenty of times and there is lots of such software already available.
I mostly just look at the communities I subscribe to, so I don't get exposed to much political spew these days. I'll only occasionally look at the "all" feed and maybe add a few new subscriptions plus see a bunch of uninteresting or annoying stuff that I ignore.
On .world, the most amusing thing is the amount of pr0n (from lemmynsfw.com) on the front page. I'm not anti-pr0n as such, but jeez, what is that doing there.
covid@hexbear is the only hexbear sub that I read regularly and it's pretty good. I don't really notice different political stuff on .ml. I signed up because it says FOSS and privacy enthusiasts. Heard about the ML angle later, but it's not that visible afaict. People need to stop wigging out. Read what you want to. Don't like, don't read. There's no reason to let other people decide for you.
Not much difference except more communities visible, i.e. less censorship. I guess a little more random downtime. I still go on .world when that happens.
Lemmy.world defederated from hexbear because of political disagreements. They do stuff like that enough that I moved from .world to .ml a month or two ago.
These days if the file is write protected, you get prompted for whether you really want to remove it. I don't know when that change appeared or whether it's universal.
I'm old enough to remember chemistry sets and they kind of don't exist any more. Anyway the stuff for making PCB's overlaps only slightly.
You probably want to first gain some understanding of the stuff you are trying to do, before messing with expensive dangerous chemicals and all that. I like Ken Shiriff's reverse engineering blog righto.com and maybe you can follow links from there.
I've always been told through hole plating is quite difficult. Make some single sided boards first, then double sided using vias to connect stuff across the two sides, before pursuing PTH. But I think home PCB's aren't really a thing any more either, at least for digital circuits. You can get super cheap board fab from JLPCB or whatever, instead of trying to do fine enough pad pitch for modern tiny SMT parts.
I have a small self-hosted Nextcloud with Nextcloud Chat and it can do video though it isn't great. Jitsi Meet is much better but I haven't tried to host it myself. I'm sure there are other options too, though idk what to suggest. Maybe see what's around on Scriptaculous these days?