It really depends on what you’re trying to do. At the end of the day, the foundational components are pretty standard across the board. All machines have a CPU, motherboard, storage mechanism, etc. Oftentimes those actual servers have a form factor better suited for rack mounting. They often have more powerful components.

But at the end of the day, the difference isn’t as striking as most people not aware of this stuff think.

I’d say considering this is your first experience, you should start with converting an old PC due to the lower price point, and then expand as needed. You’ll learn a lot and get a lot of experience from starting there.

It’s not really any different than hosting any other service.

I was lucky to get in in the early days when posting Mastodon handles on Twitter was common so was able to easily migrate. But this is a problem with ActivityPub right now I feel like. Discovery algorithms can be awful in the timeline, but so useful for finding people/communities to follow.

Yep just saw that too after I researched it a bit more. What is strange is I don’t remember Eve Energy having a firmware update since then. Makes me wonder if they had it ready to go in previous firmware versions based on internal specs they saw? Or maybe I just forgot about a firmware update I did.

but as the Matter standard doesn’t yet support energy monitoring, users are limited to basic features like on and off and scheduling

- from this link

Granted the article is almost a year old. But I just didn’t realize that Matter now supports energy monitoring. Somehow I just missed that news.

I wish it worked on more webpages. But totally agree.

What? I’m not following. Steam isn’t federating with anyone. This is about having a link to an external site. Nothing more. Has nothing to do with federation directly.

That is so bad. They clearly don’t understand the appeal of decentralized systems…

Personally, that isn’t how I think about a smart home system. There isn’t a need to do major changes until maybe you need to get it replaced anyways. Starting with things like lights, a few shades, door sensors, are good ways to start. The biggest question is what do you want to get out of it?