To be fair MS makes orders of magnitude more money and has the benefit of operations at scale. Whereas codeberg's operational budget for 2025 was 100k euro and they still need to deal with DDoS and bot scraping. They also were running off a single server up until sept'25 when they had two donated hardware services which are now hooked up to make a 3 node ceph cluster.

That #1 is crucial. I see a lot of people get stuck in tutorial hell or burn out from doing other people's projects. Some tutorials are okay if you're just starting out but at some point switching to your own projects and challenging yourself is necessary

And since OP mentioned being on/off, i would also just say be consistent. Dedicate some time to work on your own projects so you're not forgetting stuff before it really sticks

I submitted a response but if i may give some feedback, the second portion brings up:

I am willing to pay a substantial amount for hardware required for self-hosting.

This seemed out of place because there were no other value related questions (iirc). Such as:

• I believe self hosting saves me money in the short term
• i believe self hosting saves me money in the long run

I'm sure you could also think of more. But i think it's pretty important because between cloud service providers and any non-free apps you want to use, it can be quite costly compared to the cost of some hardware and time it takes to set things up.

The rest of my responses don't change but if you're wanting to understand the impact of money in all of this, i think some more questions are needed

Best of luck!

For some background, it turns out organic maps had a for profit llc registered and long poised itself as free and open source. When the llc was discovered the community volunteers wrote an open letter

When their concerns were not answered they forked the project and created CoMaps which in theory is supposed to be everything organic maps ever portrayed itself as.

CS50 is produced by Harvard and is opencourseware (free) that isn't going away.

What is changing is that Yale won't be offering CS50 courses going forward, seemingly due to funding issues.

And it makes no mention that they were modifying and using GPL code prior to making their code "open source".

Id argue that this story is not over until the GPL code can be confirmed removed by a third party

There are much smaller projects that ask for more from commits/merge messages. This is a normal ask

Gitea, took control away from community and gave it to a for profit organization. Forgejo was born

It would be much more customer and developer friendly to allow linking a service portal instead of providing a phone number. I would go insane if a user called me directly every time one of my projects had a bug or some perceived (non)issue. No, that's not how this works.

It's once per year, easily dismissed, and can be permanently disabled. Seems entirely reasonable for a piece of free software that someone would use everyday

tldr - lesson learned. buy a new domain and move over to it.

but for those who want to learn something new - you are only renting your domains. If you fail to pay by the registration date then you generally get a grace period to pay more money to renew it. If you fail to pay before that period expires then the domain will be released. Some companies like godaddy will automatically buy the domain for another year (or more). But even if Godaddy doesn't then it still goes up on a list of expiring domains and there are backorder services that will try to buy the domain or auction them off.

So in the end it doesn't really matter what registrar you use. If you do not pay, it goes back to a list where people can see it is expiring and then you'll get some people who either want to legitimately use that domain or more likely they are wanting to try to sell it to you or someone else for more than they buy it for.

And I saw someone mention file a complaint. I'm sorry to say that if you did not have money to renew the domain then you aren't going to be able to do that either. This is called Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the fee is between $1500-4000 for 1 to 5 domains.. Additionally, just because you file a complaint does not mean the issue will be resolved favorably or timely. These complaints can last years, and there is no guarantee you will get the domain back.

This is why you should always pay your domain rental fee. And if you don't, then you need to either be willing to pay a ton of money to get it back or you will need to move on. Sorry its a tough lesson to learn but if you're just a student then you probably weren't using this to run a business or anything so in the end you are quite fortunate.