I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that is by now almost 10 years old, it runs perfectly on Linux and is a fantastic choice even today. It’s built like a tank and that Intel i5 powering it is immortal. DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap now and it takes up to 16Gb, you can swap its HDD to a SATA SSD (if not done already) and batteries for it are still cheap and plentiful.

If you’re looking for something affordable for software dev, I can’t think of a better choice for $200-$300

https://www.lenovo.com/lt/lt/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t430/

They really built this one right, they don’t make them like this anymore.

Have you thought of self-hosting mailcow? https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

It’s very easy to set up and fairly straightforward to maintain, if you have a static IP and it’s not impossible to get a PTR record then I highly recommend it. Yes you’re self hosting your own mail server but mailcow vastly simplifies this.

Alternatively plonking it on the right VPS can also work.

That’s fine too, the short of it is it’s entirely up to you.

There are no requirements, and they wouldn’t be enforceable even if somebody tried. The admin of instance1 has no way of knowing that you already have an account on instance2. Your identifiable details (IP address, e-mail address) are private to the instance that you sign up with and it would be a violation of privacy (and inherently scummy) for those to be shared between instances - they’re not.

You can be anonymous on the fediverse, just like the Internet in general used to be before Facebook.

That’s entirely up to you, it can be the same username if you want. Speaking as an instance admin, there is no problem with users creating multiple accounts across instances, even if they’re the same username.

Spam would be creating as many usernames as you can on any given instance (e.g. trying to register 100 users on lemmy.world because reasons) - there’s obviously a problem with that. Creating you@instance1, you@instance2 and you@instanceN is perfectly fine.

Not at all, it’s perfectly fine to have accounts on multiple instances.

I’ve tried refreshing lemmy.world and Cloudflare blocked me:

I’m officially a bot now I guess.

Edit: But more on the topic, they have been plagued by DDoS attacks recently so my guess is it’s more of the same.

Edit edit:

It’s probably related to the redirect.

I think they’re stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they’ve done their bit for a while, and that’s if they’re still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.

My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It’s a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn’t have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn’t mean it’s well configured or secure either.

I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.

Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.

It took about the same for me.

The DB migration at the end of this upgrade is significant, I was surprised how long it took when I upgraded my instance. Lots of room for things to go wrong considering the size of their DB.