Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

Space Engineers but not a buggy mess with player scripting that isn’t in C# of all things.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

Element supports video calling and it has been working great for me.

1. I moved to Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle, and it’s been great. I’ve even started interacting with posts which I almost never did on Reddit.
2. I moved from xitter to Mastodon, but I don’t really use either anymore; it’s just not a form of social media that brings me joy.
3. I asked several of my friends to try out Matrix, and they tolerate it and message me there instead of Discord. I do a lot of video calls with my girlfriend through Matrix (via Element) and that’s been perfectly reliable. Matrix has actually worked better than Discord for me, since I use Linux (Arch btw) and my webcam frequently has green flashes in Discord but not on Matrix. I had that issue on Fedora as well so I think it’s a Discord for Linux problem.
4. YouTube is the last great hurdle….

I’ve been using Matrix for the last few months, via Element which supports some newer feature like video and voice calls, and it’s been great. My only complaint is that their Video Rooms feature is kinda flaky with video, which is weird given that one-on-one video calls are rock-solid. Voice-only in a Video Room is reliable tho. Video Rooms are still an experimental feature that you have to enable in your settings.

I’ve seen a couple of Discord servers that use a Matrix Bridge to sync up Discord chats with Matrix Spaces. The only downside to that is that bridges and bots don’t support E2EE, which if you’re bridging to Discord, isn’t much of a downside anyway.