Honestly, just spend the five bucks a year and reserve a real domain name with auto renew. You don't need to make it publicly resolvable, but you'll be 100% sure all of your internal service names won't ever conflict with anything used in the real world. If you pick the right registrar, you can easily get your hands on a wildcard DNS cert as well through Let's Encrypt, so you can protect your internal services with HTTPS!

You don't suddenly want to be restricted to HTTPS only (i.e. when Google bought .dev). There's also the minor risk of someone eventually buying your domain and causing all kinds of funky hell, like setting proxies to your internal network (through WPAD) and the names of local services (printer, router, etc.) being queried to a real DNS server because your computer sometimes appends the domain name to TLD-less queries. I've seen it happen that someone set something like example.com as their local domain (including in the DHCP config) who then saw constant slowdowns as their browser tried to resolve http://local-service/ as http://local-service.example.com/, going out to the internet every time, and not caching the error response.

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?).

That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean.

It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more decentralized web.

I know Zero Tier, and Tailscale exist - but I don't really understand how they work (and I think they require intermediate server access anyway so might as well use Digital Ocean?).

I'd like a future where you could sell users a raspberry pi running a service they can just plug into their home switch and access it securely from anywhere.

I used to drive for Uber, a few hours a week during my downtime when I was bored and had nothing better to do.

The earnings weren’t great, but it was very helpful as an extra. I had a fuel efficient car and kept track of all my expenses for deductions and made above minimum wage.

I’ve met plenty of lovely and fascinating people and had great, enjoyable conversations. I barely had any issues with riders.

This extra income helped me buy more stocks and make just a little bit more progress towards my financial goals. These stocks are still compounding away.

I’m a bit sad that this opportunity is now taken away from Californians.