I get it, and I’ve seen this response other places I’ve asked about this too. But a license agreement can just offer refunds for downtime, it doesn’t have to promise any specific amount of availability. For small, cheap, experimental subscription apps, that should be enough; it’s not like I’m planning on selling software to businesses or hosting anything that users would store critically important data in. The difference in cost between home servers and cloud hosting is MASSIVE. It’s the difference between being able to make a small profit on small monthly subscriptions, versus losing hundreds or thousands per month until subscriber numbers go up.

(also fwiw this entire plan is dependent on getting fiber internet, which should be available in my area soon; without fiber it would be impractical to run something like this from home)

Already considering using Kube, though I haven’t read much about it yet. Does it support this specific use case (making multiple servers share a single LAN IP with failover), in a way that an ordinary router can use that IP without special configuration?

Looking into this a little, it might be what I need. The documentation I’ve found on this says it uses VRRP, which creates a “virtual” IP address; will that be different from the machine’s own IP address? And will an ordinary router be able to forward a port to this kind of virtual IP address without any special configuration?

I don’t think this is it. The router doesn’t know anything about DNS, it only knows “this port goes to this IP address”. It seems like I either need multiple devices sharing an IP address or router software that inherently supports load balancing.

I’d be up for it. Haven’t worked on games for a while, but I’d like to get back to it.

I’m surprised hardly anyone else has mentioned Wesnoth yet. I last played it over a decade ago, so I’m not sure if it’s still as well-known now as it used to be, but it’s one of the highest-quality open-source games out there.

It’s a turn-based fantasy strategy game that feels like a combination of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, and D&D. And I suppose it was a lot more unique back in the 2000’s when there weren’t a dozen indie games out there that fit the same description.

Same. My wife isn’t much of a gamer but NSMB Wii and NSMBU are some of the only games we’ll play together and really enjoy. I think I’d actually pay for subscription DLC for a NSMB-style game if it gave you a few new levels to play through every month or two.

I hoped Mario Maker 2’s user-generated content would feel like that, but the levels were so small and puzzle-focused that it really didn’t work.

They actually did it, the absolute madmen. As a kid I rented this over and over from Blockbuster but never finished it. Maybe now I finally will.

I’ve had a private Matrix server for me and a few family members for years now. It doesn’t federate, and I’m afraid to try, because I run it on a potato computer and I’ve heard horror stories of Synapse federation consuming hundreds of gigabytes of space.

It’s generally been stable and performant and really nice to use. The only problem is encryption: Element seems to forget keys sometimes and need to resync. And Matrix’s whole e2ee system is arcane nonsense to anyone who’s not extremely technical. Every time that happens, it’s a long tech support call.

The solution is to just not use encryption on chatrooms, which is fine, but DMs have to be encrypted so it still comes up sometimes.