I am enamored with the idea of SDF, and I think it is an important part of computing history and the present. That being said, I am curious as to whether anyone actually finds it useful—aside from the fact that it hosts the instance!!
Exploring! SDF is like the coalition of servers I ran in college with friends and campus friendlies. A little of it was explicitly practical, some of it unstable, all of it educational and fun and sometimes stuff took off. I love that SDF survives, and I love that they have paying members.
When new or esoteric stuff hits, whether it’s 9front or the latest fedi service, SDF is where to see if it makes sense for you. Sure there’s home labs, but a home lab doesn’t have the community around it that we have here on SDF, which means it doesn’t give you the sense of how a service runs at scale or in the (sometimes positive, sometimes corrupting, but always informative) presence of others.
The mission statement is so simple:
-=- a community platform for inspiring, facilitating and implementing new ideas -=-
I used SDF for pretty much everything for a while: usenet, email, shell, and hosted my gopher site here (until I deleted it a year or two ago). These days I’m mostly on SDF’s Mastodon instance and (occasionally) Pixelfed.
I mostly use it for my website and gopher space, thought it’s nice to have a trustworthy instance to use as a home base in the fediverse.
TBH, I only just now discovered SDF. But I’m curious to explore the services more.