Your projecting. I literally said in the donation thread that I don’t care if they run their own political server in their own free time with their own resources. It doesn’t matter whether or not I agree with it. What matters is that they want to tell us that we must contribute to their hobby and political crusade. They can make all the poor life choices they want. They just can’t include me or anyone else in it.

Then you’re going to be limited to SMB generally because of windows. If you didn’t need Windows NFS is always the superior choice. But only the pro version of Windows has any NFS support.

Just getting started pretty much any hardware will do. One of the best most accessible ways of doing it is something like a cheap Raspberry Pi computer even two gigabytes of memory is enough to get started. You won’t necessarily need the bigger ones. But generally more tends to be better. Combined with some of the more purpose built OS images for things like open media vault or own cloud. It’s a pretty easy and low bar for entry.

After that it really just depends on your interest, needs, and comfort levels. You could just as easily go into eBay and buy a used $100 E-Waste business Tower. It will give you a bit more swap ability and upgradability where you can add things like 2.5 or 10 gigabit networking if you absolutely need faster. A better method of organizing and mounting storage physically. And a few other amenities. As well as some more options software wise. But if you are really new to this. And you really want to do something a bit more DIY that you control as opposed to something like a Synology Nas. It’s hard to go wrong starting with something like a Raspberry Pi.

Just make sure to keep up on your three two one. Three different copies of your data, on two different types of media, with at least one of them stored off site.

First you need to specify a bit more on what you mean by file server. Are you looking for a network attached storage for home use, or remote use as well? Or are you talking something like a seed box for torrenting Etc. What general software environment will you be working with and what others are you comfortable with.

Lol to accuse you of not liking Lemmy as a platform. It doesn’t get much more strawman. Lol you’re one of the most frequent posters I see on Lemmy in general 😝

Nutomic himself has quite a history with real shitty takes and horrible stances. Including transphobia Etc.

Then there is said flagship instance. It’s run as a leninist Vanguard fiefdom and Echo chamber. Not a development hub. Its lemmy.ml and not lemmy.org for a reason. Much of the most egregious moderation not being done by moderators but administrators. All directly under and at nutomic’s discression. Which people are well within their right to object to. Especially being told their donations must go towards enabling it.

There are a ton of devs out there with shitty politics. But it’s most of them are smart/mature enough to keep them separate.

While it’s unquestionable that them posting this here is not the appropriate place. It’s also unquestionable knowing how you behave that you are harassing them. Even if you are not “following them around”.