Had something along these lines - a mail server that ended up used almost exclusively for sending automated internal emails. We’d migrated to a third party for email sending because managing DNS etc for clients got pretty painful. Mail server got removed by the tech lead and repointed to our third party mail provider without telling anyone, and 3 days into the months we’d hit our billing limit, on the lead’s day off. Turns out that one service had been sending an order of magnitude more email than all of our other services put together, as someone had been using email as a logging method.

That was a… fun day.

Is this a surprise? User retention is hard, and I’d expect this to hit even harder as time goes by. It’ll keep going up until the point where user growth matches attrition and I’d guess in the early days of a social platform, it’s going to take a while for background growth to increase that much and attrition will be pretty high given the lack of attachment.

Glad someone made this point. My next printer will definitely be a tank printer. It’s basically flipping the business proposal back to “pay for the printer up front” instead of “pay for the printer whenever you buy ink”. My current printer was cheap enough that I basically spend enough on ink to buy a new printer every few years, given degradation of cartridges when they’re left after opening.

The protocol would seem unlikely to satisfy the concept of “necessary”. It’s entirely possible for the protocol to be impossible to implement whilst not complying with GDPR. Might require the development of something more sharded - data pulling in real time, etc.

Thanks for the heads up! Notification set, interested to see what’s shown…

Ditto with Caddy. Been using it for a couple of years now and it’s made life a lot simpler. Config format isn’t always obvious, but for most of the cases I’ve needed, a standard 3 line snippet gives you a reverse proxy with automatic working HTTPS with valid certificates.

Haha, yeah, I totally have proper backups…

Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.

The language in the article does seem to forget that plenty of early smartphones had replaceable batteries… Yeah, it might add some bulk, but it’s not exactly going to be a major hardship.

… but it seems like a good reverse step to me. Any consumer replaceable part is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Fun fact: your known bug count is super low if you don’t test properly.

I’ve got a mix of hosting environments personally. A dedicated box hosted with Hetzner (their auction prices can be pretty decent) plus a Pi 4 and an old NAS for internal services. Docker containers used for pretty much everything - mostly set up with a big ol’ /opt/ folder with a bunch of service specific folders with docker-compose.yml files and bind mounts galore. Got a wireguard VPN bridging between then because that seemed sensible.

Running Portainer for some extra management and monitoring, then a bundle of stuff:

• Mailcow for email
• Owncloud for for sync and storage
• Phototropism
• Bitwarden
• Emby for media playback
• NextPVR for recording
• Private instances of Pleroma and Lemmy
• A slightly broken telegram/grafana stack with some container monitoring stuff hooked in
• The odd dedicated game server when the need arises … and some things I’ve forgotten about.

Got a spare old i5 machine around set up to auto hook into Portainer if I need some extra grunt at some point, but it’s more likely to be used when I can’t be bothered paying for the dedicated box.

Aware a lot of it’s suboptimal, but it’s easy to work with and familiar, and that’s enough to make it workable.

Ditto with Mailcow - easy enough to set up, and has worked well enough for setting up multiple domains etc.