As long as you get a public IP address, a domain name and TLS certificate, you can federate with other servers.

I hope some of the great Reddit apps switch to Lemmy. I would definitely pay for a Lemmy version of RIF any time. That’s what happened at least with some famous Twitter apps, which now support Mastodon/Akkoma/Calckey.

I run my own SearXNG instance too. I set it up to a Hetzner box, then blocked all ports from the firewall except on the Tailscale network. This means the machine which wants to use the search needs to be connected first to the same Tailscale network. It allows me to prevent being blocked by the search providers for too much traffic and is been working great. I just open http://SearXNG from my browser and start searching.

NixOS unstable in my workstation and my laptop. Using sway on Wayland on top of all-AMD hardware. I play games with this setup and I write Rust and TypeScript for living. I love the customizability and the reproducibility of NixOS: I just clone my config and I have exactly the desktop I’ve always had, every little tool and customization included. If my hard drive fails, I just plug a new one and I am productive in about 15 minutes.

My sway desktop has been looking and working similarly for years, and before that I used i3 on Xorg for almost a decade. I like how the UI doesn’t really change that much.