Linux doesn’t really know about drives, it knows about partitions and mount points.

Obviously this is a simplification, but in general it’s close enough. It also could well be your problem - timeshift doesn’t know or care that /boot is on the same physical drive as the rest of your system: if it’s a different partition, it’s separate.

It’s a little more than 100€

It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”

DigitalOcean’s guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it’s a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you’ve posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you’re not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.

It’s not a numbers game. “They killed one of our children” does NOT make it OK for us to kill one of their children.

How is this supposed to be enforced? In a decade’s time are shopkeepers going to have to challenge anyone buying a packet of fags who looks under 28? And then later it’ll be “sorry mate, can you prove you’re 44?” and so on.

markdown support

If you are on (or migrate to) a server using the Glitch-Social fork of Mastodon, you’ll get markdown support. It’s a game-changer, in my opinion. (glitch-soc has lots of other nice features too, btw).

While true, I think most people’s concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

If you’re doing things that mean you’re going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you’re presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.

systemd [is] a niche

Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.

what if I’m not using CoreOS?

Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.

GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn’t care about and in fact doesn’t even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you’re not a programmer is to say “why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list”.

Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn’t mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.

Something becomes an addiction when you persist in doing it even though you know it’s not doing you good or even actively causing you harm. By that definition, excessive internet use IS an addiction, because many people will endlessly doom-scroll their favourite sites even though they know there are more important things they should or could be doing.

Yes, it matters hugely.

Let’s say I do a google search for “how to frobitz a widget” and the top result (because as you say it’s in Google’s cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.

I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say “lol Spez sucks use Lemmy” or whatever. I’ll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they’re not as useful as Google thought they were.

I haven’t run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you’re trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.

I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they’ll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.

Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.

It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.

At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.

I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!

The developer of kbin, @ernest, has said that automated processing of account deletion requests is on the roadmap but currently it’s a manual process.

As you can imagine, for a piece of software that two months ago was in alpha status with fewer than 100 regular users and then suddenly became one of the most-used systems on the Fediverse, there are still a lot of rough edges to be cleaned up.

How is that any different from what we have now?

Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.

If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we’re in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn’t seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.

I can’t help with Lemmy, but I’ve been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
 3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune

You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It’s breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.

We’re not actually that small, we have about 90k subscribers. But we’re still small fry compared to many that are closed.

In the spirit of malicious compliance, if anyone has any suggestions for what /r/Commandline could become, I’d be delighted to hear them!

CPU requirements for Lemmy hosting are minimal. Memory is useful - you’d want to use the Pi 4 with either the 4GB or 8GB RAM, anything less than that will work but you’ll be running the risk of difficulties if the server gets busy.

You’ll also need plenty of storage, especially if people are going to start uploading media to your Lemmy host. Given that a Pi runs off an SD card you might well find yourself running out of storage space - I’d recommend attaching a USB storage device for the reassurance in that respect.