Yeah. While I can dockerize those applications, all I checked out lack modern features and concepts/designs. It all feels heavily outdated technology-wise.

federated blog

I wonder what federated blog (or publishing platform) isn’t stuck in pre-Docker era, though.

You can run those as single-user instances or with approval of users so you can use those instances for your family and/or friends only.

The usual suspects: Mastodon (or mastodon-compatible servers like GoToSocial), PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.

I am disappointed …

Loss of control of this data would be catastrophic, so I took its security very seriously.

Ask yourself: “If my current system is unavailable: How screwed am I?”

If the answer is anything less than “Not screwed at all!”, then it is time for a backup - regardless of what system you’re using or plan to use.

Absolutely. They’re advertised for being used in datecenters, so I assume noise optimization wasn’t a concern for Seagate when creating those drives.

Sorry, I can’t hear you under my enormous piles of money! 🙃

But yeah. You should do an SSD-only setup if this is within your budget. I assume that for most of us selfhosting is just some soft of hobby. If you’re willing to spend money on the latest and cooles tech: do it. If not, then it’s fine, too.

Okay, so … then maybe really look into the Seagate Exos drives. 20 TB should be pretty much fine for most selfhosting adventures.

I’m looking for something from 4TB upwards.

If you say “harddrive” … do you mean actual harddrives or are you using it synonymous with “storage”? If you really talk about actual harddrives, it’s hard to even find datacenter/server harddrives below 4 TB. Usually server HDDs start with 8 or 12 TB. You can even find HDDs with 20 TB - Seagate Exos series for example, starting at around 360 Euros (ca. 400 USD).

If you’re in for a general storage, preferably SSD, that’s another issue. There is the Samsung 870 QVO (8 TB) SSD that is often advertised as “datacenter SSD” (so I assume it would run well in a server that is active 24/7), but it is currently available with a maximum of 8 TB. The 870 QVO is at ca. 70 Euros per terabyte (ca. 77 USD) which, in my experience, is the current price range for SSDs. So it has a high price seen from the outside but it’s actually fine. It’s also a one-time investment.

For selfhosting I’d go with an SSD-only setup.

do any have particularly good or bad reputation?

From personal experience I’d say, stick with the “larger” brands like Samsung or Seagate.

Use XMPP. Thanks to Let’s Encrypt being implemented in basically every reverse proxy, setting it up is a matter of seconds.

Make sure that, whatever switch you want to get, the switch supports simulating output (edit simulation/storing) and USB devices. Otherwise every switching action would cause disconnect and connect actions on the hosts.

You host it locally and use a web browser to access it.

I remember ZoneMinder.

A full-featured, open source, state-of-the-art video surveillance software system.

https://zoneminder.com/

Is this still a thing nowadays?

Also reliability, speed, and quality.

Is this weird right-wing echo chamber still a thing?

Fortunately in your user account config you can hide posts and replies made by properly marked bot accounts.

No, thank you. I don’t want to get cancer.

Samsung T7 totally worth every cent. You connect it via USB-C.

GoToSocial is awesome. Some features are still missing, but the server is in active development.

As front-end I use Elk. It’s selfhostable as well as publicly usable at https://elk.zone. It’s labeled as alpha software but runs absolutely well.