Any pc with two network ports and Ipfire will do. Easy to set up and configure.

Glinet makes travel routers with OpenWrt on them and internal microSD slots as well as external USB ports. Pretty easy to turn those into a media server as well.

The audio is very quiet, it’s probably a microphone or post processing issue.

Castropod is cool, maybe you can try to figure out why it doesn’t properly federate with Lemmy and file some issues on both sides?

Pcie slots also allow adding more nvme ssd drives, although sadly most mainboards do not support pcie bifurcation, so you will be limited to a single nvme ssd per slot.

Up to RPi4 the power efficiency was a lot better, but performance wise you really struggled due to lack of options to connect faster storage. With the RPi5 becoming more power hungry (but also more performant) it is less clear cut, and price wise a refurbished x86 pc isn’t really more expensive either.

All in all I would say the benefits of using standard x86 outweigh the slightly higher power use these days. RPis are still good if you need the specific hardware GPIO etc. that is has though. But for self-hosting go for x86 and be mindful of peak loads (these CPUs become much more power hungry on higher clock-speeds, especially turbo-boost).

Look of a refurbished thinclient with a 6th or 7th gen Intel CPU with the “T” at the end (for example i5 6500T). Those are basically power optimized mobile CPUs for desktop PCs. Those are currently best value for money IMHO.

Alternatively use an old laptop, which is great for beginners, but storage extension will be very limited.

If all you want is Nextcloud, you are probably better off getting a managed service like this: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

Cockpit is a simpler choice for that.

That is why I said it depends. There are many places where electricity cuts for a short duration are quite frequent. Often you don’t even notice it, but a 24/7 server would be effected.

In general, I think the risk of laptop batteries catching fire is overstated especially if you limit the charge to 80% or so. So weighting these two issues against each other you can come out either way, but I think for most places it will come down towards a UPS being nice to have.

Depends. Usually it is still good as a UPS for a few minutes, and some laptops have a bios option to limit full charge which lowers the risk even further.

Since Snikket is just an XMPP server, it can be used with desktop apps like Dino as well.

All the corporate gamification feature are probably quite annoying.

It really is an enterprise solution and I doubt your family will be happy with it.

Why not just set up a Snikket server and use that? You can easily create group-chats and share pictures and videos there and the interface is similar to WhatsApp.

Maybe https://picocms.org/

But Hugo is fine, no need to use all the advanced features.

maybe try: https://github.com/Fancy-Mumble/FancyMumbleV2

https://snikket.org/ is the easy to configure XMPP server, but it still needs SSL certificates. But that’s fairly easy to do with Snikket AFAIK.

Or you could simply ask the Snikket developers to host a server for you for a small fee. If you are US or Canada based https://jmp.chat/ is also a great service, and it includes a free Snikket server as an add-on.

I ended up with a second hand APC 1500. Contrary to some other models you can just monitor it with a standard USB cable, just cables with these inverted power-plugs are a bit hard to get by these days.

Cheaped out on UPS, now I have three basic small ones I have no use for (they work except the battery isn’t good anymore). Would have been better spend a bit more right from the start.

This is kinda the same idea but made for what you originally asked for: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

This is only the theory. In the end there is still a chip doing the routing that has a total throuput it is capable of regardless of the direction.

The routing equipment at the distribution boxes is likely a limit. Both in regards to power consumption and heat production, plus especially with older equipment the total throughput it is capable of.