Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.

I bought a M1 Mac Mini second-hand and it’s great for home server purposes. Like others have said, you’ll be using containers a bunch, so bare metal doesn’t matter quite as much as it used to. They’re power efficient and offer good performance. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, there’s a bunch of other benefits to having a Mac set up as a server (e.g. content caching for updates/iCloud content).

I’ve been self-hosting Forgejo for a while now and I really quite like it.