Ah, I just found a bug here - the instance blocking wasn't checking the instance of the author, only the instance of the community. It checks both now.
The Zig team regularly checks in on our users' projects. We read source code to find out how the language is affecting users, we test changes to see how problematic breakage might be, and we check for performance regressions.
We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt. Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs. Now, it's not our business to police what our users do, but you may have noticed people screaming in our faces about memory safety constantly. You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.
We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide.
By this time, we all felt at ZSF that Bun was a net liability, and this was before RoboBun became the #1 contributor.
A GUI will be easier to get into - you can use a gui file browser app to learn the layout of the file system, you can use a GUI text editor to change config files, that sort of thing. It'll mean you can do a few basic things intuitively which will be less intimidating. So from a maintaining momentum and morale point of view it might be best to have a GUI initially even though you have to learn all the cli stuff eventually anyway and you'll most likely be running a headless server on real hardware eventually.
Self-hosting is a very individual journey - everyone wants different things and finds they own way to meet their own requirements. So there isn't really one guide that covers everything.
Anyway, as a general road map:
Create a Virtual Machine on your PC. Install Linux inside the VM.
Play around in the VM to learn Linux basics. When you break the OS you can just wipe the VM and reinstall.
In the VM, try some docker containers until you're comfortable-ish with docker.
Maybe try Yunohost in the VM. You might find Yunohost saves you a lot of time and hassle.
Get hardware suitable for your goals.
Install Linux, configure networking and docker containers on real hardware.
If you've ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you'd know that there's no way to predict how many tokens it's going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.
It's only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it's gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you're not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren't paying for it, their company is).
Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.
No obvious signs, nope. It wasn't until I started using it in earnest that I got suspicious and then when trying to work on the code it became very clear.
I made the mistake of installing Starling recently, not realizing how it was made. I contributed a PR to it, wrote a few issues describing some showstopping bugs, and since then there's been absolutely no activity from the creator.
That's fine, they are under no obligation to work for free. But I wouldn't have installed it if I knew it was abandonware.
My second computer had a 20 MB HDD and it was wonderful to have soooo much space compared to the previous computer which had no HDD and 3 floppy drives.
Then a year later I added a second 20 MB HDD and was absolutely swimming in space.
Back then a 'large' app was 100 KB. You'd spend all day writing code and produce a 13 KB file.
Yes, each community has it's own separate tag/flairs.
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2216045/you-can-now-block-posts-based-on-their-flair