A combination of Micro Center, FS.com, and eBay for computer parts. Anything worth researching I'll try and buy direct from the manufacturer.
Dumb cheap stuff still goes to Amazon because if I need a $2 female USB-B to male USB-C adaptor or something like that I'm not willing to go through more than about 5 mins of searching and I know there's some random blob of letters company on the Amazon marketplace that will give me something that functions. I definitely wait until I have something critical or reach $30+ before actually placing the order though.
2 right now, one on Lemmy.ml and one on my own instance. 3 if you want to count the server admin account. I've been thinking about adding more accounts on my server to segregate content so frontpage for each account could be somewhat focused while all would be a mess of everything.
Tbh I don't really see much point to accounts on different instances. I might be missing something, but the only difference that I can see from a user's perspective is what instances get federated/federated. You certainly don't need an account to just browse instances for new communities to subscribe to on your instance.
Make some back ups. Its a good practice in general and when you are unfamiliar with Linux and especially the terminal it's easy to accidentally kill the os. Always take a second to think about what you just typed if the command started with using sudo.
Consumers aren't forcing the companies to have their workers work long days for little pay. Companies wanting to take in all the extra money consumers are offering without actually paying anymore out are the problem here.
Well you can get a domain with a weird TLD for $2-5 a year and $40-80 once for a SBC like a raspberry pi to run it. Ideally you'd want a small 32-64gb ~$20 SSD or HDD for storage, but in a pinch a USB stick or micro SD card that you can get for ~$5 would do. Any old computer can handle it though, Lemmy is pretty lightweight, you would have resources left over on the host to run other services. So in total if you wind up in over $100 something went wrong somewhere.
This is a big part on why I think self hosting is the way to go with federated platforms. At least I probably shouldn't ever have an issue with the admins/moderators at lemmy.teuto.icu. Being able to just point the domain name somewhere else should make migrating as simple as spinning up a new container too.
I prefer to use a local DNS for internal services just so there is less publically available information about my internal network. No need to let everyone know what address space I use or which vlan certain services are on. Also means you don't have to wait for public DNS servers to update.
A combination of Micro Center, FS.com, and eBay for computer parts. Anything worth researching I'll try and buy direct from the manufacturer.
Dumb cheap stuff still goes to Amazon because if I need a $2 female USB-B to male USB-C adaptor or something like that I'm not willing to go through more than about 5 mins of searching and I know there's some random blob of letters company on the Amazon marketplace that will give me something that functions. I definitely wait until I have something critical or reach $30+ before actually placing the order though.