It’s just a computer. You can do whatever you need a computer for. Browse Lemmy on it. Play video games on it. Use it as a server. Make it run an ad video on the TV in your store window.

Whatever you need a PC for. If you don’t need a PC for something, you don’t need a Raspberry Pi.

The entire point of the Raspberry Pi was that it was a very very cheap PC, and it’s no longer cheap, so nowadays there is definitely less reason to buy one.

Ideally you won’t, the requirement sucks

Any VPS provider just gives you an SSH IP and port. So that’s the default state, until you do something else, which I imagine many don’t, since key based authentication was always considered secure.

So I don’t know the reason, but that’s the standard practice with most providers, like Digital Ocean or Linode or whatever. You can call them maniacs but you shouldn’t be surprised at something so ubiquitous.

Hmm, I’m at the server limit (in 50 Discords) and none of them were marked in that way. Some of them have NSFW channels that I can’t access anymore, but I don’t care about that.

Maybe I’m in different kinds of communities.

It doesn’t, you just can’t view NSFW channels if you don’t. Which is a problem if that’s something you want to do, but “requires” is a strong word.

No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.

I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.

The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.

Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.

Physical access is still required to steal the mug on my dining room table.