This has to be my least fun thing setting up… and I’ve deployed some utter tripe over the years

I think I’ve tried hosting 4 or 5 different fedi type servers now and really they’re all just awful in one way or another.

I kinda feel defeated about this to be honest.

Going to remove my 1G memory limit, and just host an offical mastodon instance I think.

This is WAY more painful than when I decided at the beginning of my career, just setting up stuff whilst bored on night shifts was better than plying the Xbox (worked with a guy that would just do that all shift every shift)

Multiple RW instances of wordprsss on top of distributed MySQL, when it was all in alpha.

Distributed authoritative DNS servers around the globe, just to test out early bind and actually understand DNS…

Running Exchange 2003 “DEV” or something edition just so I could run it on a 32bit host (all I had at the time). Unlicensed. Not backed up. I didn’t know much about Exchange. There was sooooo much pain. Though. I did learn a LOT. And that has been vv useful over the years.

I am many years senior to this now. And even I feel like was back then trying to set this stuff up and make it actually usable. Ergh.

The desire to self host this, especially as it so easily federates etc I just like self hosting email or at least having your own domain so you can control who manages it for you.

I did give up running my own email infra mostly . It’s all EOL these days. Though does sometimes come into conflict with stuff (like I can’t get emails from this instance to my personal email as it’s hosted at MS, and sometimes offends some other infra. I’m often surprised how many other people don’t use 365. Meh.