Not sure it's a fitting term. Most instances aren't communities. They provide their service, but there's no "we are the members of mastodon.community and here's what we do as a community". They exist but aren't the norm. Calling instances communities probably leads to wrong expectations
Not sure that's where I'd draw the line. Imho you have a server that also serves as a NAS. Before getting an explicit machine, my "NAS" was just NFS shares on my Proxmox host, which was also used to run all my VMs. It was backed by ZFS, but I don't see how that's relevant for it being a NAS or not.
Which other location specific services do you have in mind? I've been thinking about similar things on and off. Mobilizon is a thing, and something with groups but I'm not sure what would work for locals.
I do have Dashboards in Grafana, but I only use them to look something up. I have Prometheus Alertmanager connected to a Matrix bot that sends me messages when something looks wrong.
For me, tinkering is part of the process and I'm enjoying it. Deciding to do something differently and changing a lot of stuff every now and then is fine. What's annoying is if you are in the middle of such a process and then run out of (free) time. Next time I look at it I forgot half of it if it's not finished and documented.
I had this on my to-host list, but I guess HortusFox would fit me better in this case.
Both don't seem to have kind of a map feature which I'd really like. I started to do an inventory with QGIS but that was out of my depth and I lost the files in a computer transfer (thought they were in some backup but they weren't).
Not sure it's a fitting term. Most instances aren't communities. They provide their service, but there's no "we are the members of mastodon.community and here's what we do as a community". They exist but aren't the norm. Calling instances communities probably leads to wrong expectations