This blog post mentions parking an old switch with a derpy little raspberry pi.
Also, what makes colocation something for businesses is cost. The likes of Hetzner also sells colocation, and nowadays you can buy a used rack for around $100.
Moreover, today's COTS computers are not like your parent's. A mini PC selling nowadays for peanuts has gigabit Ethernet, 16GB of RAM and half a dozen or so cores. You'd pay a small fortune for servers with those characteristics in the early 2000s, and nowadays that hardware is used to check emails.
This blogger has weird preferences and money to burn on them. Doesn't mean it's a sensible way to do things if your main aim isn't reminiscing about being a '90s-'00s sysadmin.
I don't know. Spending $100/month on colocation costs is hardly a tophat-wearing level of expense. I recall reading from the old Reddit-to-Lemmy migration discussions that some self-hosting instances were costing that much on AWS, and they are still up.
For perspective, we're in an internet forum where from time to time we get posts of users spending thousands on their home labs.
I don't know. Might be, might be not. All I know is that there are already companies that are even selling colocation specifically for Raspberry Pis. It's not that weird, and not a step too far away from colocating Mac mini instances.
Oooooh, they do ! 120€ for 14U, now we're talking ! It's in Germany of course...
I think that indeed my problem here is that I live in too expensive a place, expensive for me, expensive for my servers ><.