…and the fact that their website uses AI generated templates, colours, fonts, call to action sure makes me believe that uncritically :/

You check the source code of the website, or is that just the vibe that you get from it?

I agree that my first reaction to the website was also that this might be AI generated, but on a second look it doesn’t seem so clear to me.

Apparently not:

We have a no-AI contributions policy. This is because, generally speaking, LLMs generate code that, while may work, is poorly organised and difficult to maintain.

They seem to have moved the client into the main repo.

I guess it could be useful to discover and download open-source and drm-free freeware games.

So this would allow you to self-host a library of open-source games and have people connect to it with their Steam like clients to always have the latest version installed and so on?

Getting relatively non-technical people to install the correct versions for multiplayer games is a real pain without something doing it for them like with Steam.

https://snikket.org/ works well with XMPP under the hood.

But why a new Discord server? 🤦

Opensense is based on BSD, which has a single threaded network stack. This means that low end CPUs can struggle to do >1gbit throughputs. Depending on your WAN this could be an issue.

Sure, but the point of getting a mini-pc is usually not that you have an open case with a second ATX PSU sitting on top to power some extra hardrives.

How will you power the drives?

And from what I have heard, these m2 to SATA adapters have over-heating issues.

You mean “mid” as in midi-tower? Because that sounds like the large version. Well maybe there is an even larger workstation version or so, but the normal medium sized Optiplex comes with one 3.5" SATA bay and one DVD drive.

Optiplex etc. with an Intel 8th gen “T” chips seem to offer the best bang for the buck + energy efficiency on the second hand market right now.

The main issue with these thin clients is the lack of SATA ports and power connections for them if you want to add some larger 2.5” SSD/HDD storage. Usually it is only one, but you can also use the DVD drive slot with an adapter in the mid sized versions.

It’s not a big deal, but a single user instance has some issues with discoverability as it will only show communities you personally have subscribed to.

A fediverse instance obviously.

You can use the same containers with Podman, but docker-compose is not recommended with Podman and you rather use Quadlets which integrate nicely with Systemd.

Previously had some good experience with this store selling refurbished hardware: https://www.computerstoreberlin.de/

Old DDR3 ECC is actually cheaper than regular DDR3 RAM, and it generally works with AMD CPUs (who unlike Intel don’t artificially restrict ECC support to their enterprise offerings).

But tbh, ECC is generally not needed and I wouldn’t bother designing a system around it. Use a file system with checksums and regularly scrub the drives and you should not have any major issues with random bit flips that ECC protects against.

No, typically you use the DNS server of the domain provider.

Hosting your own DNS server is possible, but if you don’t have a static IP address the other DNS servers will have no idea which server to ask when your IP changes, so in this specific scenario it wouldn’t work. And in general it isn’t really worth it as you get a DNS server with your domain included.

DynDNS short for dynamic DNS is what you want. But IPv6 only websites are unfortunately even in 2026 still not accessible by many people due to their ISP only supporting IPv4.

ionos.de has VPS for 1€/month, which are not that bad. Server locations are Spain or Germany afaik.