You’ll never get away from maintenance for ant service you host, and you need a VPS at a minimum to handle mail unless your ISP allows it (which they probably don’t). There’s going to be front loading needed in order to make sure the IP you’re given isn’t on blocklists, and you’ll need to take appropriate measures with Apple, M$, Google, Yahoo, etc in order to send email to their domains. The good thing is that I’ve you do that, you’ll never need to touch it again.

I personally use iRedMail because of the breadth of documentation, but mailcow and others like that are allegedly nice. I prefer the omnibus solutions because I don’t care to do manual service configuration if it’s not necessary.

Been doing email hosting for my domain for 25 years, 12 years with iRedMail.

You rip them and provide them to a community that will then re-dub them into something fun. Hilarity ensues.

Seems like this could be killer for building a multi-Turing Pi rack mount case.

I’m running the mastodon stack in docker via a compose file. It was straight forward. Follow the instructions to the letter and it will work.

I will say that it is in your best interest to have an automated update process happen, either manually (via cron) multiple times a day or have some kind of orchestration layer that manages updating the component images once they are released. Mastodon has had some nasty 0 day bugs that involved account and server takeover that had to be fixed immediately, and you don’t want to lag very far behind in those cases.

Edit:

Docker compose from their repo:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/docker-compose.yml

That is probably true, however, I personally use it to share with others who are not part of my network, calendar integration, password database access across many devices, rsync backups across *many devices, document editing via Collabora and probably other things I’m not thinking about at the moment. I don’t have the performance issues that others note, but I took all of the performance improvement steps noted in the documentation: have bare metal well-resourced db hosts (for multiple services), dedicated redis cache, properly configured php-fpm, etc.

Nextcloud is good at general cloud features. It’s not specialized in photo management. If you’re storing memes or cell phone pictures it’s fine, but if you use an actual camera that uses a RAW format, you’re much better off using Immich.

Chromaprint Discogs Acoustibrainz submit Replaygain

I think that’s it off the top of my head. I also keep my albums separated by release, as there’s multiple releases of albums and I didn’t like mixing that stuff up.