Well... anything, really. Ok, fine. It's actually a domain name that belongs to me, PastThePixels.
Ok... well that doesn't really describe it either. It's a Raspberry Pi 4B, 4 GB edition running in my house with Cloudflare.
Well, we've just described Potatoe the thing, but what about what's on the thing?
To be honest, I don't really have an exact definition for Potatoe.
I've always wanted to have my own domain name, and have a server, and there's so much I want to do that I can't just focus on one thing with this domain.
Potatoe is my homelab, where I host my own cloud suite of software like Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and OnlyOffice. Hopefully, one day I can get the server to be powerful enough for me to start opening up these services to more people.
But Potatoe is also my way of talking with the world -- it's where I have my blog, and a place to share what I do to the Internet.
It might even be a server for others -- I'm thinking of eventually hosting a Mastodon instance, or even creating a Matrix/Discord server so this corner of the Internet can open up a little! Stay tuned!
I used to just have Potatoe as a Nextcloud/Jellyfin server with DuckDNS -- not really that secure, but it was free and worked at the time.
I need just one thing, though... to have a domain extension.
At the time, I was playing this weird game I found called Potatoman Seeks the Troof, and was captivated by its utter absurdity.
I, too, needed something absurd -- enough to show that it doesn't take itself too seriously, to have some level of uniqueness that it stands out, but also to act as a blank canvas, not tied to anything, allowing me to give it a definition.
So to put it simply, I chose the name "Potatoe". (The game is also where the icon came from, by the way. It miiight be a bit of a spoiler for the game though...)
Over the years, I've tried to look at different icons/names for the server (believe me), or even when creating new "servers" online (remember that Discord/Matrix thing I was talking about?), but I kept coming back to Potatoe for some reason. It's just a captivatingly absurd name.