Sphere

Proprietary social networks that exploit users’ rage and addiction-prone personalities crashing and burning.

If this kind of thing becomes widespread, then people will find a way to broadcast fake anti-camera signals as well. Imagine a thief breaks into your house and you want your security cameras to record them… but guess what, the thief broadcasts an anti-camera signal and they all switch off, completely neutralising your security system. “Unintended side-effects”

Expensive and impossible to customise effectively, making it much poorer value than Android. Not that Android is perfect. The instant some form of non-proprietary Linux (like Debian w/phosh, PostmarketOS, etc.) becomes viable as a daily driver, Android is out as well.

Some of the best deals on Low End Box come in a fair bit cheaper than that. Not so long ago there were truly low-end deals on OpenVZ in the realm of $1-$2 per month, and I’ve seen Racknerd servers for $20 a year. If you’re going to pay $5/mo you could get Linode/Akamai, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. It all depends what you want specs-wise and what your risk appetite is - the lower-end / newer players might be less reliable than the more established ones, use older hardware, or have additional AUP restrictions on them. It’s a matter of matching your needs carefully with what you are buying.

Of the alternatives available, Libre Computer, Pine64 and Orange/Banana Pi all offer options that fit what you’re looking for. You can generally find these on Amazon, eBay etc at a reasonable price.

I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:

• SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
• NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.

These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.

It’s gone quite smoothly so far - found an instance local to me and joined, subscribed to a bunch of communities, installed Jerboa and set it up - didn’t hit any roadblocks.

The cross-server subscription thing is a bit counter-intuitive, but this seems to be an issue that people are already aware of. The Fediverse lengthy signup ritual of choosing an instance is there, but that’s just a feature of how the medium works and I’m already familiar with the issues from Mastodon, so it didn’t bother me.