That's tragic. Was he also not helping maintain sandstorm? Would appreciate a blog post or a note about him there
For my part I stopped pushing monthly Sandstorm updates this year as there hasn't really been anything to push. Unfortunately Sandstorm's biggest dependencies can't even be updated anymore because of breaking changes that would take significant effort to work around.
I agree a blog post is probably in order.
Would you say that there have been user-friendly Docker/etc. wrappers for self-hosting LAN services? Someone has recommended casaOS (or the proprietary Umbrel), though I haven't tried either yet.