Happy first birthday to thejerks.club! I registered the domain name sometime around October 2022, but I didn't have time to do anything with it. December 22, 2022 is what I consider the official start date of the community - the website, Gitea, and XMPP server went online that day.
At times it's been a rocky road - the XMPP and Gitea servers went offline when I used up all the disk space because I forgot to set Prosody to log only errors and warnings (I had it debug logging when setting up Prosody which emits a message every time you breathe in the general vicinity of the server), everything went offline when my ACME client didn't properly fetch a new certificate, everything went offline when I accidentally let the domain name expire, Prosody's database got corrupted due to a power outage, and I accidentally let the operating system get so out of date that it didn't receive updates.
In other ways, it's been a great blessing. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I never check my phone, and I haven't used Discord since they rolled out the arbitration policy in October 2018; hosting my own XMPP server allows me to keep in touch on my own terms with many friends with which I definitely would have lost touch. I've also had a lot of fun writing for my blog. You wouldn't know it from my current writing, but back in high school and early college I believe I was a halfway-decent writer. However, with the nature of my job the only things I write are code, emails, and papers, neither of which really exercises my writing chops. The blog gives me a good outlet to mess around with writing, I hope to eventually return to my former glory or even surpass it.
In the next year, the themes will be automation* and *safety. I really need to figure out how to properly automate ACME so I don't have to worry about certificates every 3 months. I also need to properly set up logging and fail2ban. I plan to create a logging and system administration interface in Emacs so I can ditch the primitive practice of ssh'ing into the server to administer it. The server currently runs on a laptop, which has a built-in UPS in the form of its battery - I need to figure out how to safely shut down the server when external power is lost to prevent data corruption. Finally, I need to figure out how to auto-update the website upon a push to the website repository. Currently, whenever I push a change I have to manually copy the files over. I accomplished this years ago on a different server running Debian using Python and inotify, but I'm not sure how possible this is on OpenBSD yet. Finally, I want to get my hands on a managed network switch so I can provide air-gapped isolation between my private network and the server - currently I have firewall rules in place to ensure protection but I'd sleep easier with air-gapping.
I've talked at length about how I'm going to update the server hardware to a cluster of mini-pcs; I've determined that this is no longer necessary. I'm not running any particularly intense workloads so an old laptop that I never use is perfect for the task. The server laptop has a built-in Nvidia GPU, so it would be neat to figure out a way to use this but I can't think of any uses off the bat. It's an on-chip integrated GPU so it's not the most performant thing ever, but it seems a waste to not use it. Anyways, if I want to start up a modest compute cluster I'll look into upgrading the hardware but I think for now it's good.
I'm not planning on hosting any new services. I've flirted with the idea of hosting a NextCloud instance but available space on the laptop is in the single-digit gigabytes, this wouldn't be too useful in my opinion. In my brief time using Mastodon, I noticed the network attracts even more extremists than Xitter so I have no interest in joining that community. Peertube and Jitsi are off the table due to very limited network bandwidth.
I began my self-hosting journey around 2018 with several iterations of online VPSes. Along the way, I've learned so much about Linux, system administration, and automation. This is my first attempt at fostering an enduring online community and it's been so much fun. I would recommend anyone with an old unused computer, several hours of spare time, and plenty of patience take up this endeavor. Here's to another year!