I run the midwest.social instance. I’m also active on lemmy.ml. @seahorse@lemmy.ml
This is why I’m glad I joined some leftist communities in my area. We try to expand our community to as many people as we can, through as many organizations as we can, but we can only do so much. The US is most likely the least class conscious place in the world, so we’re in a constant uphill battle with the cold war propaganda brain worms infecting most of the population.
I was a teenager in the early 2000s and social media was just becoming a thing. While I did partake in early social media like MySpace and Youtube we did do other, usually dumb, stuff. I played airsoft with friends, went spelunking in the storm water sewer system lol, watched movies with friends. I remember we found an abandoned house in the woods near a park and explored that multiple times.
Someone in IT security explained to me once that in the US the government usually pays far less than private sector jobs, so they don’t have a very good pool of applicants who want to “serve”. They usually leverage cyber criminals’ punishment by making them work for the FBI and the like. Maybe the Chinese government pays well?
My self-hosting area is a disaster so I won’t post pics, but I run an Asustor NAS with openmediavault installed on it and docker containers running transmission-openvpn, radarr, sonarr, and jellyfin on it.
I have a pi-hole set up with recursive dns set up as well as pi-vpn so I can remote in from anywhere and access my movies/shows on the NAS as well as have ad-blocking.
I run syncthing on my daily driver linux computer that syncs photos from my phone to it so that I don’t have to email myself stuff if I need it.
Finally, I host my Lemmy instance and Mastodon instances from two VPS servers on Digital Ocean. Not sure if that counts as self-hosting if I don’t own the hardware.
I think I searched for “open source reddit” and Lemmy was one of the search results. Joined lemmy.ml, and then a year or so later started my own instance.
If you type !michigan@midwest.social it should open a dropdown to choose the community and create a link for you.