Yes… but the meme doesn’t work if said practice is barely on the scale.

Because yeah, there are some REALLY sketchy registrars. Working with the “reputable” ones and now taking advantage of a nation’s country code for the lulz (see: .ml) keeps you pretty safe.

… if DNS is the worst capitalist practice you know of then you REALLY should spend less time shitposting and more time paying attention to the world.

Yeah…

Spend some time in the “I hate reddit and am glad I am never going back but do you think reddit still thinks about me and hey, can I take a picture of your penis and send it to show reddit that my new boyfriend is massive?” communities. LOTS of the folk around here have those “I was banned for absolutely nothing” mentalities.

And it shows with how fast people are to “clown on” folk with just blatant insults.

Those folk aren’t at all exclusive to hexbear.

Lemmy, in general, is left leaning with the lead dev and “main” instance being unabashedly tankies.

Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there. The ml crowd is generally still worth talking to. Whereas the hexbear crowd immediately jump to harassment the moment they decide you failed a purity test because you advocated for a social program rather than insisting the entire system needs to be burned down and a managed economy run by putin put in its place.

Needless to say: Anyone who spends enough time “on lemmy” is either on an instance that banned hexbear or muted them themselves.

I mean… if you spend time actually discussing the fediverse, it IS a shitshole. We drove off fucking Alec of Technology Connections for crying out loud.

It is the problem any message board had where the “old guard” get really pissy when they see new people who aren’t making the same in jokes and deferring to them at every step. So you have endless bullying and shitposting and so forth to make sure they understand “the community”.

Mastodon is still awesome if you mostly get ignored by them but it goes to shit REAL fast once they see people are having fun and it doesn’t involve them. Been scaling back over the past few months as a result.

Lemmy is doing a bit better. In large part because most of the horrors are confined to the tankie servers. But you still get the groups of people who make the olde reddit “I am technically correct and you will respect that” crowd seem to be not that bad. It is kind of depressing when the best outcome is often that someone posts a complete non sequitor and then wanders off rather than ACTUALLY have a conversation about the implications of “AI” and astroturfing.

It is the “problem” of how accessible everything is. I know plenty of genuinely amazing coders who have no idea how an operating system (let alone the hardware it runs on) works because they don’t need to know. EVERYONE has stories of people who don’t understand directory structures because they grew up on google drive.

And it REALLY does not help that the average fediverse evangelist can’t shut up and just give a simple answer.

In the Warframe space? What I and others have noticed works REALLY well is to tell the person trying it out “At the end of a mission you are going to get like 40 currencies. Ignore that shit, it doesn’t matter”. And in fediverse stuff? The answer is just to say “It is like having an email account at gmail or hotmail or whatever”*. It doesn’t matter. Just go to join-lemmy.org or whatever and pick one of the top servers after doing their questionnaire".

Instead we have “Well, you need to understand federation and why it is so important. Read this white paper and then come back to me and I’ll suggest a few youtube videos that explain what you are having trouble with”

*: The fact that I couldn’t think of a good email provider that normies use IS the problem.

1. Learn how to take a screenshot
2. Clean your damned screen

More drives is always better. But you need to understand how you are making it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels is a good breakdown of the different RAID levels. Those are slightly different depending on if you are doing “real”/hardware RAID or software raid (e.g. ZFS) but the principle holds true and the rest is just googling the translation (for example, Unraid is effectively RAID4 with some extra magic to better support mismatched drive sizes)

That actually IS an important thing to understand early on. Because, depending on the RAID model you use, it might not be as easy as adding another drive. Have three 8 TB and want to add a 10? That last 2 TB won’t be used until EVERY drive has at least 10 TB. There are ways to set this up in ZFS and Ceph and the like but it can be a headache.

And the issue isn’t the cloudflare tunnel. The issue is that you would have a publicly accessible service running on your network. If you use the cloudflare access control thing (login page before you can access the site) you mitigate a lot of that (while making it obnoxious for anything that uses an app…) but are still at the mercy of cloudflare.

And understand that these are all very popular tools for a reason. So they are also things hackers REALLY care about getting access to. Just look up all the MANY MANY MANY ransomware attacks that QNAP had (and the hilarity of QNAP silently re-enabling online services with firmware updates…). Because using a botnet to just scan a list of domains and subdomains is pretty trivial and more than pays for itself after one person pays the ransom.

As for paying for that? I would NEVER pay for nextcloud. It is fairly shit software that is overkill for what people use it for (file syncing and document server) and dogshit for what it pretends to be (google docs+drive). If I am going that route, I’ll just use Google Docs or might even check out the Proton Docs I pay for alongside my email and VPN.

But for something self hosted where the only data that matters is backed up to a completely different storage setup? I still don’t like it being “exposed” but it is REALLY nice to have a working shopping list and the like when I head to the store.

A LOT of questions there.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.