I have been subscribed for a while because it seems like something I _would_ like, but I honestly still don't get it. It seems like a hobby driven by a deep reverence toward enterprise hardware and software, especially network-related, most of which is no longer in production. Is there more to it?

For me, there are two reasons -

First of all, it's a sense of enjoying to tinker, same as a lot of people do with Raspberry Pis or Arduinos. The challenge is partly why I'm a developer in the first place.

Secondly, when storing large amounts of data (> 20 TB) or running high powered systems, cloud hosting can become very expensive very fast, especially if you don't need 99.9999% reliability (although for anything important - 3 backups, 2 devices, 1 offsite). I bought a used xeon 6-core server with 24gb of ecc ram on ebay for around $400 a couple years ago, along with a half dozen 5TB HDDs.

It makes it easy and was a mostly one time cost to mess around with DNA algorithms, docker/k8s, media encoding, home automation, and more. I've been considering upgrading to use an SAS backplane next, but with commercial 8 and 10TB hard drives getting cheaper, I may never need to jump to more drives then I have now.

You get private / self-hosted alternatives to various popular online services? Own your own data, and it's fun to setup.

List: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

Ok, that's what I was missing, I think--I see that stuff as "advanced home networking" and less lab-like. But I do really enjoy it.

How do you manage with all the upgrading and maintenance? It seems like a simple distro upgrade could throw various stability-oriented subsystems like "photos of my family" into compete chaos.

That's the exact reason I stopped using that stuff. Nothing is worse than the roommate complaining about being unable to watch tv while the raid 5 rebuilds.

That's where "stable" distributions (like, e.g., Debian stable) come into play.

You only get updates for security-related stuff (and, IIRC, stuff-breaking bugs), which seldom break things.

Snapshots. Make them, screw up, revert.

Depends, I just enjoy running my own server rack and self hosting a bunch of stuff. It's nice not having a dependency on third party cloud storage for example, I run my own "cloud storage". I also learned Kubernetes using my lab and it was a lot more interesting than if I had just deployed one using a cloud provider, bare metal is really cool. The amount of compute power + storage + memory that I have for my cluster would easily cost £300+ a month in the cloud.

I can't speak for others, but for me it's just a hobby pure and simple. I enjoy experimenting with new software for personal and professional reasons.

Also, hosting a home media server allows for perfect 4k streaming regardless of bandwidth speeds and/or your home networks current load.

Serves as a hub for my home automation setup as well.

Lots of things, all fun!

These lab environments are useful for studying and prepping for industry certification exams like the CCNA, LPIC, MCSE and so on.

That homelab sub has a big population of people who feel personal empowerment or hobby satisfaction as either the secondary or primary utility to exam prep. Some even to the complete exclusion of exam prep.

I don't get what you mean by "... most of which is no longer in production."

It seems like most home lab folks run a lab to gain experience on platforms people actually use.

I think the homelab community has people from one extreme (racks of servers) to the other (smaller servers like the TS140). All share a desire to host their own services and just have fun learning and doing.

For me it's just practice for cert exams and a way to move my career forward.