delendum

Have you thought of self-hosting mailcow? https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

It’s very easy to set up and fairly straightforward to maintain, if you have a static IP and it’s not impossible to get a PTR record then I highly recommend it. Yes you’re self hosting your own mail server but mailcow vastly simplifies this.

Alternatively plonking it on the right VPS can also work.

In practice UPC will probably have some kind of fair use policy buried in its terms of service - your best bet is to go through those terms and see what you find. Fair use typically means they will start throttling you beyond a certain point. Most ISPs keep this reasonably vague (e.g. if your usage is in excess of what they deem to be reasonable, but no actual data amounts defined).

Not all ISPs have a fair use policy though, and typically you’re better off on large ISPs where your usage doesn’t really stand out that much.

It’s not a mass exodus. There was a sizeable influx of people from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin, sure, but that’s measured in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Reddit has hundreds of millions of active users.

The reality is it’s not even close to a mass exodus, not yet.

My 2 cents:

Simple, no domain required stuff:

• Pi-hole for self-hosted DNS: https://pi-hole.net/
• Navidrome for self-hosted music server: https://www.navidrome.org/ (best to pair this with an external portable HDD/SSD for music storage)
• Set up syncthing on it and use it for automatic file back-up: https://syncthing.net/ (that external HDD/SSD will come in handy again).

More advanced, should pair with a domain:

• Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won’t be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
• Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.