Goons are responsible for the destruction of so many good things on the internet. Best $10 I’ve ever spent.

Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.

In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.

You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.

And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.

So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.

Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.

We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.

That’s a misquote: it’s “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It’s basically saying that you, as a consumer, cannot legitimately make ethical decisions when buying, because the entire system is built on being exploitative, and thus any decision you make cannot be ethical because the choices you have are already the result of exploitation by the time you’re making the decision.

A good example is the “going green” fad: it does not matter which consumption choices you make, because your choices are effectively irrelevant. You spend a little bit more money for the “green” product, and that money will go directly to megacorporations that are exploiting and polluting on a scale that so outstrips your ability to combat it. Thus, your “more ethical” choice did absolutely nothing but fund the exact same polluters and environmental exploiters as if you had not made the “green” choice in the first place.

Anything on the public internet is some amount of risk.

It sounds reasonably configured, and for a single service that’s been fairly robust, the only thing you really should make sure you’re doing is updates - better if you configure automatic updates, so you don’t even have to think about it.

unattended-upgrades is what you’d want on a Debian-alike for updates, and Overseerr depends on how you installed it.

They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.

That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.

But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.

TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.

UptimeKuma is what I use; it’ll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites… whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.

One other option is the “Always Free” tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.

There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I’ve used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.

The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.