Max-P

Ordered two drives from them, came in very well packaged and even included the PWDIS adapter. Very good deals. Could throw the box across the yard and the drives would probably survive.

As a starting point. Are there any hardware recommendations for a toy home server?

Whatever you already have. Old desktop, even old laptop (those come with a built-in battery backup!). Failing what, Raspberry Pis are pretty popular and cheap and low power consumption, which makes it great if you’re not sure how much you want to spend.

Otherwise, ideally enough to run everything you need based on rough napkin math. Literally the only requirement is that the stuff you intend to run fits on it. For reference, my primary server which hosts my Lemmy instance (and emails and NextCloud and IRC and Matrix and Minecraft) is an old Xeon processor close to a third gen Intel i7 with 32GB of DDR3 memory, there’s 5 virtual machines on it (one of which is the Lemmy one), and it feels perfectly sufficient for my needs. I could make it work with half of that no problem. My home lab machine is my wife’s old Dell OptiPlex.

Speaking of virtual machines, you can test the waters on your regular PC by just loading whatever OS you choose in a virtual machine (libvirt if you’re on Linux, VirtualBox or VMware otherwise). Then play with it. When it works makes a snapshot. Continue playing with it, break it, revert to the last good snapshot. A real home server will basically be the same but as a real machine that’s on 24/7. It’s also useful to test things out as a practice run before putting them on your real server machine. It’s also give you a rough idea how much resources it uses, and you can always grow your VM until it fits and then know how much you need for the real thing.

Don’t worry too much about getting it right (except the backups, get those right, verify and test those regularly). You will get it wrong and eventually tear it down and rebuild it better what what you learn (or want to learn). Once you gain more experience it’ll start looking more and more like a real server setup, out of your own desire and needs.

I feel like a lot of the answers in this thread are throwing a lot of things with a lot of moving parts: Unraid, Docker, YunoHost, all that stuff. Those all still require generally knowing what the hell a Docker container is, how to use them and such.

I wouldn’t worry about any of that and start much simpler than that: just grab any old computer you want to be your home server or rent a VPS and start messing with it. Just pick something you think would be cool to run at home. Anything you run on your personal computer you wish was up 24/7? Start with that.

Ultimately there’s no right or wrong way to do things. It’s all about that learning experience and building up that experience over time. You get good by trying out things, failing and learning. Don’t want to learn Linux? Put Windows on it. You’ll get a lot of flack for it maybe, but at the very least over time you’ll probably learn why people don’t use Windows for server stuff generally. Or maybe you’ll like it, that happens too.

Just pick a project and see it to completion. Although if you start with NextCloud and expose it publicly, maybe wait to be more comfortable with the security aspect before you start putting copies of your taxes and personal documents on it just in case.

What would you like to self host to get started?

Nope. The protocol is way too public for shadowbanning.

You can be banned by other instances than your home instance, when that happens no new post/comment from you will federate to that instance in particular but the others still sees it as normal.

For example, I could ban you on my instance, and I wouldn’t see anything from you ever again, but my instance would be the only instance to see that ban.

If you get banned from LW or lemmy.ml then a lot of people won’t see you so that could definitely feel like a shadow ban, but there’s nothing shadow about it you can see it in the mod log.

It ran fairly well for me out of the box. I think it’s similar to trying to run Windows 98/2000/XP on modern VM software, it gets utterly confused and needs very specific hardware configuration to boot. Modern VMs run this good in big part because of paravirtualized hardware.

I think what made Ubuntu so good is a combination of being based on Debian and also being there at the right time when Linux software was getting generally better. When I tried Mandrake it was too early for Wine to run any sort of game, codecs were lacking for video. When I tried Linux again with Ubuntu, there was now VirtualBox and computers fast enough to run that reasonably, graphics drivers were more usable. Compiz was popping off to show off that Xorg could now do compositing like macOS and Vista.

Mandrake was good but limited by what Linux could do back then. Enjoyed it quite a bit but 9 year old me ran back to XP for the games. When I tried Ubuntu I was a bit older and more interested in programming and WoW ran great in Wine, so I managed to stick and have been on Linux since.

The website requests an image or whatever from 27748626267848298474.example.com, where the number is unique for the visitor. To load the content the browser has to resolve the DNS for it, and the randomness ensures it won’t be cached anywhere as it’s just for you. So it queries its DNS server which queries your DNS provider which queries the website’s DNS server. From there the website’s DNS server can see where the request came from and the website can tell you where it came from and who it’s associated with if known.

Yes it absolutely can be used for fingerprinting. Everything can be used for fingerprinting, and we refuse to fix it because “but who thinks of the ad companies???”.