Cyborganism

This is dystopian level privacy nightmare.

That okay.

If you want to host just for yourself that’s okay. Just be careful about cybersecurity. You don’t want that box to become an easy entry point for hackers.

Having self hosted before the age of the cloud, on my own personal PC, I highly recommend to have a seperate box on a DMZ part of your router and only open the required ports. And use a super stable distro like Debian stable. You don’t want the bleeding edge on there as there could be bugs and vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched yet.

If you need to access it remotely, use SSH and disable root login and only allow logging in using SSH keys. Disable password login. And update often and back-up often!

Finally, keep all eye on the issues of the GitHub pages for your fediverse app so you can be aware of any important updates and patched or vulnerabilities. Shut down your service if there’s an important vulnerability that’s not fixed yet.

Would you simply host for yourself or for others?

The issue I have with self-hosting is that the day something goes wrong, you lose your account along with all your posts. And if you host for others, they also lose all of theirs.

I know this isn’t the answer you were looking for. But I have the knowledge to self host and all. I have 17 years of experience as a Linux sysadmin, a software developer and now a DevOps specialist. And I honestly don’t want to bother because of the responsibility. However, there are organizations and non-profits who have the resources to host stable long-running instances. But they need money. So I donate to the instances I use instead.

But it you REALLY want to learn, start learning about Linux web servers, databases, networking, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes) and a good bit of cybersecurity. Hosting stuff on your laptop is a good start.