This is a bizarre article.

In the UK, average life expectancy at birth was 81 years, according to 2021 data from the World Bank - the same as in Slovenia, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria.

To frame that as “the UK has one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries” is… misleading, to say the least. Why does Germany have one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries? Why does Denmark?

Services vary a lot on how they are deployed and their dependencies, etc. The knowledge I have (and honestly I don’t have much) I just built over time, tinkering with different set-ups and trying to debug problems when they arose. So I guess just choose a few difference services and try to get them working (choose low-stakes ones at first, where the risk of getting pwned or losing everything is very low). Docker can abstract away a lot, so maybe try more direct deployments if you are interested in learning.

https://tasks.org/

• Lower upfront costs and quicker to set up as you don’t have to buy the hardware
• Don’t have hardware taking up space in your home
• Flexibility of being able to scale up or down your specs (or get rid of the VPS entirely) at the click of a button
• Don’t have to open your home network to the internet
• Better uptime (not your job to fix outages)

But I agree that who upvoted a post shouldn’t be federated.

This also surprised me. I wonder is it necessary for technical reasons to prevent repeated upvoting of a submission by the same user?

When I was young, I spent a lot of time playing Extreme Paintbrawl. I only learned years later that it had achieved notoriety as one of the worst video games of all time. Looking back it’s not hard to see why. But back when it was one of the very few games we had for PC, I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Donations, or with a small enough instance a server admin might just pay out of his or her own pocket. Maybe if Lemmy were ever to get much bigger there might be paid or ad-supported instances.

I think a big part of the point of federation is that the costs of hosting servers can be distributed so no one has to spend millions to keep their server running. That way there is less of a need to monetise an instance (and less of an incentive, as if you start doing anti-user stuff, people can just move to a different instance).