General question but how do y’all actually find a mentor? I feel like there’s probably a local group nearby me or something that I could look into but are there places/people that are more likely to say “yes, I will mentor you” in y’all’s experience?

Yeah, I would still be using mullvad if they hadn’t removed port forwarding – it’s too damn bad but I get why they needed it. Switched to Proton but I imagine they’ll run into the same issue down the road and will need to find a more permanent solution.

I honestly love having all my stuff self-hosted – lemmy is one of maybe three websites that I actually visit rather than having an rss feed send me the info. If anyone is curious, I’m more than happy to go into my setup a bit further but here’s the tl;dr on it:

• I run all docker containers in Portainer so I can view all my container health in one spot. The only thing that is not containerized is a raspberry pi running PiHole to block ads across the whole network
• I have Jellyfin as my media server pointed to a shared network drive. Jellyfin gets all of its movie, tv, music, and book information from Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, and Readarr. They in turn are able to download things from Prowlarr which connects to usenet and ahem other sites for media
• I run backups to a backblaze bucket from Duplicati and sync all files across multiple devices to backup from Syncthing – this handles my phone, my laptop, my server
• I have an RSS aggregator with Miniflux so that all the sites that I actually care about come to me rather than me having to check their pages for an update. If I find an article that I want to read for later, I send it to Wallabag – an opensource version of pocket
• I also host multiple databases on the server and connect them all, as well as remote databases with Trino for running sql queries on projects I’m working on
• My latest project I’m working on is feeding articles from Wallabag to a TTS engine and creating a selfhosted podcast just for me

All of this runs on an Intel NUC that isn’t anything super heavy and you don’t really have to do anything big or complicated like this either – just find a thread that looks interesting and pull on it, rinse, and repeat!