let them fight

At work we use Creo Parametric. I have a cracked copy of it at home, but I still prefer modeling in FreeCAD.

The former. The MiaB install is basically running a script on a fresh Ubuntu system, and the instructions stress that it should be a single-purpose machine. Mailcow uses docker though, and might be able to cohabitate in parallel with other docker containers on the same machine. I haven’t tried Mailcow as anything other than an end user though.

I’ve never tried Lavabit but I run Mail-in-a-Box. It works alright, and is pretty low-maintainence. I tried setting up Postfix and all the related programs on a couple distros and it was a nightmare (and I like to consider myself fairly competent at this sort of thing). Highly recommend just using something like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow instead of winging it. Biggest downside (at least for Mail-in-a-Box) is that it requires its own VPS. It is not designed as something you can slap onto an existing machine with other duties.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/02/bob-lee-tech-executive-murder-case-san-francisco

As somebody who’s generally interested in science and technology, HN also sufferers from terminal libertarian VC-brain. It’s a club for wannabe founders of unicorn tech companies who view themselves as enlightened ubermench. This doesn’t always bubble to the surface, but at times of controversy it is quite glaring. Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered they were practically calling to liquidate the homeless, even though the incident - predictably - was the result of a personal dispute with somebody he knew.

Even if the subject matter scratches an itch, the community is not for me.

Not many. Around 100. It does cache media from other instances for a period of 7 days though. This is adjustable, but even if you cut the caching down to one or two days, it will be more than a baseline VPS can handle. At my host, they start at 40GB and by the time you get to my storage needs, a much pricier dedicated server is required. Instead, I offloaded the storage to another provider and have nginx keep a much smaller 48 hour cache of media that actually gets requested by users on the VPS itself.

You can set up a mail server. You can set up something like Nextcloud. You can set up a personal website, or just run a webserver and turn it into a place to dump files. You can set up something like Syncthing to facilitate sharing files between your devices. You can set up some types of Federated services, but in my experience Mastodon is too heavy for a baseline VPS. I needed to augment my instance with additional memory, CPUs, and an S3-compatible object storage provider for about 600GB of user media. Lemmy might work, but I haven’t tried running it on a VPS on the open Internet yet.