I work in emergency management but I’ve always been interested in tech as a hobby. That led me to start self-hosting Plex on my desktop about 6-7 years ago. Now I’ve got a dedicated machine running unraid with about 20 to 30 different docker services.
I really enjoy being able to figure out how to setup a service and then being able to be fully in control of how it works. Beyond just enjoying tinkering with the system to learn, I enjoy being able to troubleshoot and fix problems without relying on large companies.
That’s exactly what happened for me. I used to be a mod for a bunch of subreddits (including some fairly popular ones) but I realized I just didn’t really enjoy it anymore. Which is a shame because I’ve started and maintained a lot of communities over the years but being a Reddit mod just killed that for me.