thats definitely something I want. i really want to be able to have compatibility with as many apps as possible and podman/toolbx are awesome for that.
i dont like ubuntu, both stock and as a base for something else. my experience with distros based on it has been pretty bad, and given the choices canonical tends to make I dont think they are heading in a direction I like.
thats not a whole instance though. thats just a place for an account to be. on activity pub platforms anyone can just make an entire indepent and independently functional instance of the platform.
but can I use a random old computer I have in my house to run an instance as long as there are a managable number of users? renting a server isnt self hosting. making one yourself is self hosting.
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are 'open-source' even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren't truly open-source, and I stand by that).
ive looked at that, but its really more an issue of phones not using generic hardware and therefore needing to be entirely reverse-engineered before they can have all of their features used, and by the time thats done they're too old.
yeah ive heard about KDE Linux but its too early to use rn. hadn't heard of microOS