I know this was tossed around a while back, and there was even a post about it a few months ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1vrldba/riding_on_the_ltt_isp_idea_this_video_on_getting/
Ironically, I've been in the game for a few months now.
I operate as a hobbyist (technically a small business, but I still think it's hobbyist lol) personally, I have co-location in a few data centers and run my own little "mini data center" in my basement in my free time, routing BGP between my sites over WG tunnels, etc. Nothing too fancy, I can't afford DIA haha.
Just thought it would be cool if LTT did a video highlighting their journey so I could compare.
I was suckered in by a group of my friends personally. Hanging out on Discord late at night talking about our labs, and someone brought up they route their own traffic and I was like "hey, I should do that, that sounds fun!" and started looking into doing what I do now.
(Let me tell you, none of figuring out any of that was fun lol)
I had a crazy experience learning about co-location, transit, peering, the costs associated, how to get my equipment into a data center and hooked up (lots of hours forming a business, learning business finance, negotiating contracts, and researching laws) and just building everything out.
I've personally rented VPS's and baremetal servers in the past, so I was familiar with the concept of running a "server in the cloud" but this felt like an opportunity to jump from someone else's equipment to my equipment and pick up some new skills.
After forming / establishing my own business, I registered an account with ARIN, acquired an ASN, and requested a LIR v4 + v6 block. I got the v6 block pretty quickly, and got waitlisted for the v4 block.
After that, I span up a BGP-router on a friend's infra that he has in a DC, provided he had transit already I was essentially a downstream-peer from him and funneled in/out my traffic over Wireguard for a while.
I got co-location in town for a fair price a bit later, and migrated everything over to that to get better latency and more "dedicated space" for me since I was sharing on my previous setup. I personally like to dub it "my hardware, my rules" in a sense haha.
After that, I got my v4 block, and really hammered down on "what" I want to do with it. Mostly static allocations to my site(s) (home, parent's place, two DC sites) and started building.
Currently on "my slice of the internet" I've been working on standing up DNS (dual-stack, IPv4 + IPv6) and a few websites I used to host on leased IPs that I thought would look prettier on my prefixes. I'm currently considering what I want to do next, I'm thinking SIP/VOIP, but I'm unsure.
I've always been into self-hosting, so I thought of this as "the next step" from that, literally forming my own routes and learning how the internet works. It's been a wild ride, and I'm looking forward to what comes next.
I'm sure LTT / FP is looking to do something more oriented towards transit of traffic pertaining to Floatplane and video streaming. (Likely won't be cheap based on the conversations I've had with Cogent and the other transit providers lol.) I wound up personally getting a deal with my co-location service since I don't generate a whole lot of traffic.
Regardless, I just thought I'd ask how that's going, and share my own experience. I love what I do, and while I may not use it in my day-job (I do more localized deployments, think jr. sysadmin/technician work) I still find it awesome to play around with!