I have a big enough house to be able to put this machine somewhere out of the way but there are plenty of cheap server gear on classifieds. I paid ish 300 euros for a 32 core machine with 40gb ram. I can host all the things without it even breaking a sweat.
Probably uses a lot more electricity, but I haven’t really noticed it on my power bill
I swapped to Linux for similar reasons many years ago. The initial idea was to hedge and get familiar with it so I had peace of mind. I ended up staying in the Linux sphere for most of my devices , except for my music production machine that still run windows.
It looks really nicely wrapped up, but i still hope for a season 2.
This has been a great boon to me. Whenever Apple upgrades Mac OS, I check my regional equivalent to craigslist for cheap music gear that stops working. Has worked twice for me. I got a really nice 24 channel audio interface for 20 bucks.
If we want an open chat service, I’dd look into Matrix, which is federated like kbin/lemmy. Its also a work in progress, but it does support both text chat and voice/video chat. And it does have rudimentary “spaces” which lets you group channels and such, which makes it easy for people to discover the channels in our community.