They have fairly reasonable guides on their site on how to host for others.

https://foundryvtt.com/kb/

Depends on what part of “set up” you’re referring to. Getting the software itself up and running is extremely easy. They have versions available for the full swathe of experience levels from “here is a packaged Electron based Windows application” to “here are the node.js source files”. All prior versions are also available if you have specific needs for an earlier version.

Now, if you mean how difficult is it to set up and run a game, that’s going to vary wildly depending on the system the game uses and how complex of a scenario whoever is running the game wants to deal with. There are lots of off-the-shelf one shots or campaigns you can run where that setup is already done for you though.

Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.

FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.

Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.

But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby."

How does this make any sense at all? How does one “pass as even younger” but still somehow “look legal to passersby”? Those are directly conflicting concepts.

There’s a big difference between something being rational and being able to rationalize it.

I’ll grant “differentiating”, sure, but hating? Hard disagree.

I would be ashamed of myself and be tempted to leave the industry in disgrace if setting up DDNS and allowing a single port through a firewall took me 45 minutes.

I won’t stand for this PowerShell superhero comic erasure.

Jellyfin has some security issues that, depending on who you ask, are either critical vulnerabilities that make it completely unsafe to expose to the Internet or largely unconcerning for regular users.

I had exactly the same experience, at about the same time. Had been hearing good things about Plex so decided to try it out. Immediately noped out when it required me to create an account with them. Similar to you I looked around and found it to be a relatively new change.

Frankly baffling to me that anyone with the wherewithal to self-host was okay with it.

Cool. Now explain “deus vult” and the Jerusalem Cross in the context of their modern usage in North America.

My first read of this headline had me thinking “that’s strange, gendered bathrooms are still pretty normal, they can’t possibly have been banned, could they?”

…it hadn’t even passed within miles of my mind that this was talking about racial segregation. I can’t even comprehend this level of regression.

OP doesn’t seem to have responded, so no, but that’s not the fault of the question.

Because of the XY problem. The problem OP is stating may not actually be the source of the issues OP is experiencing.

Finding out what OP is trying to do will better inform a solution and may make the stated problem irrelevant.

It’s easy to volunteer other people, but these are civil servants who inherently believe in the rule of law by default. That programming in itself makes it hard to go against this lifelong belief in doing things by the book.

It also means risking their livelihood, which I expect in many cases is an even greater deterrent than an aversion to rule breaking.

When I initially set up my media server I went with Jellyfin over Plex mostly because the idea of having to create an account on an external service to use software I was hosting myself rubbed me the wrong way. Since then the more learn about Plex the more baffled I am that anyone chooses to use it at all.

the quality was better

This very much depends on when you’re taking about. Over the air television when I was young was absolutely not better quality than any streaming service now. 480i delivered by an analog interference-prone signal definitely does not compare favourably to streaming.

I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.

how do we balance that hate speech should have the same footing as voicing concerns around oppression?

Nowhere in the 1st amendment does it require that all speech have the same footing. It just means that it cannot be illegal at the federal level to say what you want. It carries no stipulations that platforms need to tolerate it being present, or that anyone has to listen to it, or that you can’t kick someone out of your home or business for it.

There are a few options there.

As someone else mentioned if you’re using IPv6 then it doesn’t matter, you’re already routing internally even if you’re using the public DNS name, no extra work required.

All the rest are for IPv4.

If you’re not behind CGNAT some routers/gateways are also smart enough with their routing to recognise when they need to route back to their own external IP and will loop back locally instead of making any hops out to the internet. Again, if this is the case for you then no additional work is required other than perhaps running a traceroute to confirm.

Another option is to add a local DNS entry for the name you’re using to resolve to a local IP address instead of your public address. The complexity (or even possibility) of this is going to vary considerably with your setup. If you’re running your own local DNS e.g. pihole or similar then it’s trivial. This is how mine is set up.

If all your clients are going to be on PCs (or devices you have more than the typical manufacturer allowed modicum of control over) then you can do something kind of like the previous, just with all your local hosts files.

If none of the above are options, then you’ll unfortunately have to fall back on using a local name/address, which means a slightly different client setup for devices you use exclusively in your home versus ones you might use elsewhere.