I switched to Fogejo just by swapping out the image. So far gitea hasn't been malicious with its trademarks now being owned by a private company, but I feel better using software that is more closely tied to a nonprofit. I see no reason to switch back.

The servers aren't even identified in the listing as R610s (or E01S, they misread that as "EOLS"), so who knows...

I would still go with one that isn't one of the biggest. My general advice is to find one that fits the vibe you're going for, communities you're interested in (e.g. some are focused on art or cybersecurity, etc), or is somehow tied to your locality. It shouldn't matter that much, though some servers will be a little more (or less) strict with things like federation, content warnings, alt text, etc. Usually the server will have some info telling you some of this, and their admin should be linked and likely has a post or two pinned to their profile explaining some of this as well.

I am partial to kind.social, though have opted to run my own instead of joining up anywhere.

No. - sent from my iNstance

The EFF is neither right nor left wing, they advocate for privacy and freedom. Free speech includes speech you may not like, and it certainly includes things I do not like. Luckily one of the freedoms generally included in "free speech" is the freedom to ignore, shun, call out, shame, etc. those who say things I don't like if I so choose (like what you are seemingly trying to do with this post, in fact).

What could you possibly need a tripod phone for?

Yeah it's not automated or anything, I just pop an incognito window and use it when there is a communitI think is worth seeing sometimes in "All" (or just for archiving purposes) but don't want to clutter "Subscribed". I may make something to auto-subscribe to communities meeting some criteria or something at some point in the future...

There are certainly better ways to do it, but lots of people use external disks. I would put anything that needs speed on the SSD (so like a database or whatever) and anything else (media, isos, etc) on the external drive. It's probably also worth thinking about a backup strategy, at least for anything there that matters.

There is certainly an inflection point. I am not sure where it falls. If you rarely use Lemmy the other servers are expending effort federating to you for no reason, so for a heavy single user it is probably a positive. I imagine it also varies based on how you browse as "new" is probably "lighter" than "hot" or "active".

There are ways to host things from home without opening ports in your router at all, this usually involves running something that calls/tunnels out of your network and back to some service and accepts incoming connections and sends them "baskward" over that connection. Cloudflare offers something called Tunnel, ngrok does something similar (though mainly aimed at development and not production hosting), and you can even host something yourself using something like frp (which is what I use, even for the Lemmy instance I am writing this from).

I haven't looked too closely at it, but there is an awesome-tunneling page someone put together that goes over these options and more.

Let me know if you want a bit more details on these options or specifics of how I've set up frp.

Under load it can get pretty hot, might be better with a less power hungry processor (I've got an i7). Battery is reasonable 4-5ish hours (55wh and they recently announced a drop-in replacement with better chemistry that is 61wh) with what I would consider to be "normal" usage in Windows 10 including WSL, browsing, running the software I am working on (usually node or golang), etc. It's also better if I lower my screen brightness, but I usually keep it pretty high/max.

Perhaps I am a unicorn, but I have self-hosted my email for years and don't have deliverability problems. The only problems I have had:

1. I think I had to sign up with some sort of Microsoft thing or submit a ticket to them or something because I had an issue with sending mail to o356. That was resolved quickly and I haven't had a problem since.
2. My server host (Linode, and Digital Ocean before them) is on the UCEPROTECT-L3 blacklist, because they (and whitelisted.org) are a bunch of scammers and block entire ASNs for almost any amount of spam, then extort individual mail server operators to get their IP specifically delisted.

To me one of the big things that differentiates Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) from email is that most of it is public, so the things in email that would involve sharing someone's private information (email addresses, IPs, email contents, etc) are public (at least the post/comment and username+instance), and can all be verified. I think there is a lot of potential because of this. Maybe I'm crazy, but I just really don't like the idea of a whitelist-based system because it means I as a small instance operator may have to sign up to dozens of services like the one you are building. I want my instance to be able to federate pretty much as widely as possible, and to me such a burden is too much to ask within a system/protocol/fediverse that is designed to facilitate sharing and decentralization.

Also, I think there is already room for a problem with "capture". What motivation is there for .world .ml or beehaw to bother signing up for your thing? Even assuming you get 100 like minded admins to sign up for Overseer that is probably a pretty small fediverse island without them, some or all "mega" instances will probably just end up getting a pass anyways and at the end of the day no system is in place to help with the problem of bot/spamming users on trusted instances (whether in that WoT or just blindly trusted by the WoT).

Most of the spam I get is from gmail addresses, I don't see it going any differently here.