EDIT: You don’t have to answer for my specific purposes, if you use a database for any purpose yourself then please share and tell what and why.
I’m not planning to host any fediverse or mastodon instances just yet, but maybe a private email server and porting a discord channel to matrix might be in my future.
What do you use and why? Is it limited to a specific OS, and if you were on a different OS then what would you be using instead? Do you think server hardware is required for most operability or can a good desktop computer and internet speed suffice as long as downtime isn’t a problem?
Those services come with their own databases that you don’t have to directly manage.
Grab their respective Docker compose files and run them up and let the app handle the db.
The !selfhosted@lemmy.world communities can give far better answers than a generic community like this.
All the discussions I saw about it said that I would have to make a new table in a database to store it on, but I guess that’s only if adding it to an existing database instead of letting it make a new one? Should I be letting it set up its own database without understanding database maintenance to begin with?
I don’t mean to sound rude but because you are asking what db to use it sounds like you don’t know what you are doing. In that case let the individual apps run their own db.
Yes you are using more compute resources running several dbs at once but if a db falls over only one app is effected.
I absolutely have no idea what I’m doing, asking questions is evidence of lack of knowledge, couldn’t possibly be considered rude.