Running #email is treacherous these days, when you consider spam blacklists. A lot of people turn to some provider, Gmail, Outlook, or someone else focused mostly on the business of email. This way, if you send an email, you have the best chance of getting it through, as the thinking goes.
On the other hand, email is federated, and it is still very much possible to set up the required software yourself. It's still an attractive way to communicate with friends or family, even with social media. Even if universal deliverability is an uphill battle for the email self-hoster, what about just delivering to a smaller group of people?
The idea would be that, if you had a few friends who self-hosted their email, you could simply whitelist each other's servers. They could be on cheap VPSs, or even residential internet connections. The point is, the task of running email becomes easier if you don't have to worry about being worthy of every other major email provider in existence.
This of course is not useful to someone who wants to self-host for their business or some other organization. In that case, you would obviously want to put in the work to get your servers whitelisted, or perhaps just go with another provider. This is probably always going to be the case. But, the fact is that the protocols associated with email, for all their pros and cons, can still work to deliver messages. It's still an ability individuals have to control some of the infrastructure they use, and is something that should be taken advantage of.
So I can put my #Mastodon handle in my signature in this, so I don't have to type it in each post? That's handy. Mentioning this handle here seems to be the only way to see comments about posts here.
My home networking gear is sitting on a UPS right now. My power is reliable, but every now and then it goes down for an hour or so. It's rare, but it happens. To solve this, I took an old UPS and added a couple bigger batteries, which sit on the shelf next to it. This provides 18 Ah at 24 VDC, which is 2-3 times the capacity of the original batteries. My total load is a hundred watts or so.
This has worked well. I would, however, like to make some changes. I have some smaller network devices, a switch and Raspberry Pi in particular, which could run just off of 12 VDC. I have toyed with the idea of powering these directly from a battery floated across a power supply, or with some kind of DC UPS or switching arrangement. It would also allow the possibility of adding #solar power into the mix, adding it in parallel.
This is a low priority, as things are working now. But something to think about for the future.
So comments don't seem to work as in a normal blog, in they aren't displayed on each posting page if someone replies on the fediverse. However, I can mention myself here, @toroidalcore@hackers.town and should then be notified.
Then, I suppose, a discussion thread can happen wherever you are on the fediverse.
And now I think I have a systemd unit file going for it. It's also running behind a reverse proxy. So I can just enable it to run automatically, instead of running it in screen.
So far I like how minimal this is, it's just a blank page to type on. Being able to upload media would be nice, but maybe not a deal breaker. It definitely seems like a fast and lightweight way to get onto the Fediverse with your own instance.