Just get a used ultra-small form factor PC a la the Tiny, Mini, or Micro series. A higher-end one which is 7 generations old will still absolutely destroy the Pi in terms of performance.

Once I gave up (for now) on doing all this on ARM and switched back to x86, everything got way easier to actually accomplish.

Check out ServeTheHome's "Project TinyMiniMicro" on Youtube for a great overview of ultra-small form factor ("1 liter") business PCs.

The big three PC makers each have standardized products in this form factor with (relatively speaking, compared to smaller manufacturers) tons of spare parts available.

lemmygrad is actually pretty far up the rankings in the defederated-by stats I saw a couple weeks ago 😅

Maybe because of the literal content of your post?

I scrolled through some of their posts and comments and it’s full of ridiculous anti-left propaganda, for example a post where some liberal Florida family fleeing the state when some child protection laws got passed, implying liberals abuse children and won’t live in a state that doesn’t allow them to.

I've got news for you: the entire planet has not taken up American political idiocy. Nobody outside of the USA (and many of the people in it) gives a fuck about American political slapfights.

If you want a safe space instance for one or another American "team," find it somewhere else or start one yourself.

I'm not in favor of defederating over political preference at all. I don't come to this instance expecting an echo chamber, and an echo chamber is precisely what I do not want.

holy crap, that was ........ ... ..... .. 25 years ago???

I don't honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I'd say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.

My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren't always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem ... and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn't filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment ... fix the typo and walk away slowly ... wild west days!!

Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.

Go with "1-liter" aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don't have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)

Remember, Facebook literally facilitated ethnic cleansing as a result of their techbro "move fast and break things" philosophy and their disinterest in paying for content mods with knowledge of local languages.

Meta doesn't give a fuck about anyone here or anything we've built. Mark Zuckerberg wants power and money and to push his weird bloodless McDonalds-ized vision of what the Internet should be on every single person on this planet.

Fuck that, and fuck any sort of cooperation with it.

I made the decision to leave shitty corporate platforms for a reason. The people I'd like to follow or interact with who still only use such platforms can come to their decision in their own time.

I am not interested in selling out my values, nor am I interested in enduring a tsunami of bottom-of-the-barrel interaction with average Meta users, in the name of interoperability. Meta made the choice to be a shitty entity with shitty values that builds shitty things. I don't feel like being covered in shit.

surely the solution is a “wait and see” approach

No. I don't want anything to do with anything Mark Zuckerberg touches, and I don't want to have to wade thru an ocean of drivel from the type of users his services attract in order to socialize online.

As somebody who's been on the microblogging side of fedi for nearly 6 years, and who dicks around running a couple tiny instances and is chummy with a couple other sysops - I am 100% aboard the "will never federate with Meta, and may defederate with others who do, depending on how this goes" train.

Netsplits suck. But Meta is pure cancer, and sometimes amputation is necessary.

I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.

FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there... just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.

I’ve set up a Discord server

:facepalm_picard: