Hosting for yourself so you can access your content outside your home is usually the use-case, use WireGuard for that though (checkout headscale) along with virtualization, VLANs, etc.
Hosting for a group of friends and/or family can usually be ok, assuming that is a well known and restrict group.

Hosting for the general public from home is usually not recommended, use a VPS for that. Bear in mind you’ll likely be liable for what you host, one way or the other, depending on your jurisdiction.
If you store content (files others may upload like movies and photos) you may be responsible for that (i.e. is that content legal in your jurisdiction?).
There may be a legal distinction between the server’s geographic location and the entity responsible for it - but in your case it’s the same, so, again, beware.
Just linking to content deemed illegal may get you into trouble.
Putting the site behind a login-only page and vetting account creation could mitigate (or exponentiate) this.
Anyway IANAL.

What do you want to host and for whom?

Maybe headscale will do better?

Old ThinkPads

I’d probably go with Mint XFCE or those listed, or you can search for distros that target older hardware. I’ll get back to yo on that.

Reminds me of the 56K handshake.

virt-manager supports, at least, kvm and lxc/incus, so you should be fine.

The Rust code isn’t closed source yet
FTFY

but they do exist and most of those would be solved with a memory and type safe language.

Maybe.

Still, there are other sources of bugs beyond memory management.

And i’d rather have GPL-ed potentially unsafe C code to… closed-source Rust code.

I fear moving away from GPL that moving to Rust seems to bring, but Rust does fix real memory issues.

So you prefer closed-source code to potentially unsafe open-source code?

Take the recent rsync vulnerabilities for example.

Already fixed, in software that’s existed for years and is used by millions. But Oh no, memory issues, let’s rewrite that in <language of the month>! will surely result in a better outcome.

as long as the linux kernel is still gpl.

I seem to recall some drama about rust in the kernel… what could that mean…

See other comments: all these rewrites are not using the GPL but rather permissive licenses like MIT. Bye-bye FOSS (in those ecosystems).

Kinda like a full 180° back to UNIX™.

I’m happy with FeedBro (browser extension), very customizable.

Wrong target audience, Bob.

Microwave. Strong magnets. Drills. Scrapyard shredders. Volcanoes.

You’re probably thinking of PairDrop (which also allows extranet).

You can OnionShare if you’re worried about privacy.

A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.

Or headscale.

OK