I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.
I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.
It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.
Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.
I used to own both a Series X, PS5 and have my gaming PC (all in the same room - desktop currently has an i5 13500, RTX 3090 24GB, 4TB of NVME storage & 128GB ram)
Got myself a 5m hdmi lead capable of driving my 4k/120 TV and just ended up using my pc for everything now.
I just switch sources between my monitor and tv when I want to game on the couch. Any mouse/keyboard input needed, I do it on the Unified remote app on my phone and fire up Steam big picture on the tv.
Sold the PS5 and XBOX and ditched two more subscriptions hitting me every month.
No regrets so far.
Are classic side scrollers ok to suggest?
Fighting as the car (hornet) from Daytona USA on Fighters Megamix is the one for me.
Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.
I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.
I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt
It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.
If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.
I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.
After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.
As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.
Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.
I’ve got a Libreddit docker instance running on my home server and together with the libredirect browser extension, if I click on a Reddit link through a search or news article with a link to Reddit, my browser automatically goes to my Libreddit instance with the content on full display.
Now, whilst on my Libreddit instance the other day after being redirected from a news article I took a peek at r/all and the whole feed was pure shit, nothing like I’d seen before on Reddit.
For some reason, it was full of doordash posts, rateme style posts taking advantage of thirsty usersand shitty TikTok reposts.
They may well have won, but at the moment there is a glut of absolute shit on the front page of the platform. I’d guess quality content has taken a hit.
I’ve got 2 pihole instances in my home, one on my Unraid server in a Debian VM as a backup in case the main one goes down.
The main one is running from a cheap Igel M340c thin client I bought off eBay for around £20 ($25) running Ubuntu Server.
Cheaper than a Raspberry Pi at the moment and perfect for running a Pihole on.
If you want something cheap, consider a used thin client machine.
They’re doing the right thing in this case for sure.
Not having one of your official update/news mediums being fundamentally changed in how you and your customers interact with each other by a hostile third party is a good thing.
Shoving things onto twitter/discord/facebook wouldn’t be a good alternative either.
When I got into my gaming rut I took some time off and got into Homelabbing. Used to scroll through my extensive steam library and nothing caught my interest so I needed something new.
Learned about different NAS Os’s, Docker, Linux and seeing what I could get out of some low-powered hardware and what I loved most was learning new things.
Started with a Raspberry Pi when they weren’t stupid expensive and moved onto a cheap Intel Nuc to my home made, small form factor NAS running Unraid and a 2nd cheap Thin Client running Ubuntu Server.
I focussed on doing more with my computer hardware and for a long while, didn’t feel the necessity to game much, then one day I fired up Forza Horizon 4 and had a good, enjoyable 5 hour session on it.
Now I’m back into re-playing Horizon Zero Dawn, I plan to move onto Forbidden West after and tearing around the UK and Mexico in Forza Horizon 4/5.
See if you can find another hobby or something that can enhance your knowledge on something you’ve never tried before for a while, one day you ,ignite just fire up a game after having a rest and get that spark back.
Just claimed that and Neverwinter Nights, I always forget to check each week!
Thanks.
Friendship ended with Reddit users, now fedverse users are my new best friend(s).
I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab
Works great.
Warhammer Boltgun, Forza Horizon 4 & Fallout 76.
Boltgun is incredible, best new game I’ve bought this year.
Fallout 76 (don’t judge) is great just to burn some time doing events with randoms and joining public teams.
I’ve really gotten into Forza Horizon 4 again recently and am also playing through that on the Deck.
I’ve added a 1tb SSD to mine so it’s running Windows and Linux meaning I’m pretty much free to play my whole library. Love the thing.
I started with the Black Widow fallout 3 perk figuring there world be more male characters than female when fighting.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Widow_(Fallout_3)
It stuck after that.