This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I'm not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
Fellow old fart. I remember having to call my buddy so he could hook his family's phone line to his bbs before I'd dial in. I remember standing up a web server in the days where you could find all the new sites on a page at NCSA or CERN. When there was a literal directory of the WWW.
The corps definitely made it easier to get out there, and thank god for online shopping, but the dream of connecting with random people on the other side of the world never had banner ads or unskippable video propaganda.
I really thought that I was NOT old fart… but since I remember lowering coax (not LAN) cable to my buddy one floor below over the window to play AOE… I guess I am :)
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn't have the 'me' mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
beehaw.org recently posted detailed June financials, and the bottom line is something like $600/month, including 1TB of bandwidth overage, for one of the largest public instances (they're not responding atm or I would post the link). Before the reddit exodus, lemmy.ml was the largest instance, and it was running a couple thousand users on a $100/month VPS. Lemmy.world has posted itself running on a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server at hetzner. https://blog.mastodon.world.
For an instance with only a few users, like friends & family, it should be pretty cheap.
I haven’t seen what will happen in the long run, but I’m running my one-person instance on a Linode nano server with 1 CPU core and 1GB RAM, which costs $5. Bought a domain for $2.50/year. Seems to be running fine so far, but I might eventually end up moving it to my local unraid server if I have problems with resources.
Seeing this community made me try Linux once more and learn more about hosting.
Installing Mint sucked since my computer was not apparently going to BIOS, as it was not displayed ob my monitor until I plugged a second monitor through the Displayport