My needs are pretty similar to yours and I’ve recently moved back to using hypervisors after running everything from Debian to Arch to NixOS bare-metal over the last decade or so. It’s so easy to bring-up/tear-down environments, which is great for testing things and pretty much the whole point of a homelab. I’ve got a few VMs + one LXC running on Proxmox with some headroom on a 6th gen i7, you should be fine resource wise tbh. Worth mentioning that you’ll most likely need to passthrough your drives to the guest VM which is not supported via the webUI, but the config is documented on their wiki.

Overall, I’m happy with this setup and loving CoreOS as a base-OS for VMs and rootless podman containers for applications.

I’d take those tens of milliseconds. That shit scales and I’ve seen infra in the scale of millions more-or-less glued together by shell scripts and coreutils/busybox.

I feel like it’s a balancing act and you can’t make everyone happy. I, personally, don’t hang around unmoderated communities because they are often worse: hostile, full of spam and questionable content… so basically /b/. But even 4chan is moderated to an extent shrug

You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DMCA).

This is the way to go. I also run sshguard on all publicly-accessible hosts just to reduce traffic from bots, otherwise I just ssh over tailscale.

Similar service, just with more built-in features than pihole, namely supporting DoH/DoT.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki/Comparison

Safari supports extensions these days, including first-class support for content blockers

One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.