Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN

You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.

I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.

For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.

It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.

This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.

You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.

Hosting for the public, it’s honestly going to depend on how many users you are going to have. Pretty much anything that is light on bandwidth should be doable. Websites, blogs, wikis. XMPP chat servers might work. Matrix might work as well. Adding to your seeding idea, you might seed torrents for any Linux distros you happen to like or build torrent seeds for projects with larger download sizes. I seem to recall a project that would enable you to seed peertube channels as well, though I can’t find the project right now.

If it’s just you and maybe a few family and friends,say over a mesh VPN, what ever you want, though video streaming may be a bit much for that bandwidth. Any other type of personal media should be very doable. Books, music, that sort of thing.

Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.

I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.

Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.

Possibly. I don’t remember that being an option when I was setting things up last time.

From what I’m reading it’s sounding like it’s just acting as a slightly simplified DNS server/reverse proxy for individual services on the tailnet. Sounds Interesting. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to use on the backend (what happens if Tailscale goes down? Does that DNS go down too?), but for family members I’ve set up on the tailnet, it sounds like an interesting option.

Much as I like Tailscale, it seems like using this may introduce a few too many failure points that rely on a single provider. Especially one that isn’t charging me anything for what they provide.

In my case, most things that I didn’t explicitly make public are running on Tailscale using their own Tailscale containers.

Doing it this way each one gets their own address and I don’t have to worry about port numbers. I can just type http://cars/ (Yes, I know. Not secure. Not worried about it) and get to my LubeLogger instance. But it also means I have 20ish copies of just the Tailscale container running.

On top of that, many services, like Nextcloud, are broken up into multiple containers. I think Nextcloud-aio alone has something like 5 or 6 containers it spins up, in addition to the master container. Tends to inflate the container numbers.

I’m also on SDF’s Mastodon server. Fairly small and largely general purpose. Seems to have pretty good uptime.

I use FinAmp client with Jellyfin for music.

I agree the Jellyfin interface is not well optimized for music, but FinAmp negates most of that and my phone is how I mostly listen to music anyway.

I like Navidrone, but it’s a duplicate service that doesn’t really have a big value add over Jellyfin beyond the ability to share tracks with friends. A major feature upgrade, but not something I use terribly often.

And iOS app as well, though, it is in test flight

Off the top of my head:

• Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
• Immich (Google Photos replacement)
• Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
• LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
• Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
• Jellyfin (Primary media server)
• Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
• Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
• Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
• Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.

Like everyone else is saying, make sure to check the battery health, but otherwise just treat it like any other used car. Take it to a shop you trust, tell them you might be buying the car and to tell you everything they can about it. If your country has something similar to a CarFax (basically a background check on a car), it would also be helpful to pull that as well.

Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.

I don’t want to see a single server grow to the size of Reddit. I wouldn’t mind the network as a whole growing to that size, though.

I suspect that if the lemmy side of the fediverse did grow to the size of Reddit we would probably see a lot more fragmentation than we currently have.There’d be upsides and downsides to that.

Matrix would probably be one of the better options, but xmpp is a pretty good choice as well.

KDE default, so it opens the start menu, or launcher. Whichever you want to call it.

If I had to guess, never having used it myself, is that it has a decent UI that simplifies sometimes complicated operations and it has been around seemingly forever.

EVs seem to be exclusively trucks and SUVs in the US, which is incredibly annoying because that drives up the prices

Lol! I’ve been cursing the exact opposite for the last couple of years! Seemed like all anyone wanted to sell were high priced, luxury EV sedans. It wasn’t till recently that I started to see EV and hybrid pickups.

90% of people that own them just use them to commute back and forth to an office and don’t need them either

No kidding. Around where I’m at, we call them beauty queen pickups. And are usually poking fun at their owners.

They’ve made our streets into an arms race of size and weight which contribute to major safety issues as well as all the other issues that come with excessive oil consumption like environmental issues, dependency on foreign countries, war, etc.

That was actually a result of the CAFE standards. Basically killed the light truck market over night. I remember back in 2007ish when the standards were changed and the new models started showing up on the streets, going “Fuck, that’s huge!”. Actually confused them at first for medium duty pickups (Think F250 or F350). Before then, the most common vehicles around me were, if I remember correctly, the F150 in work trim (which was about half the size it is now), the Ford Ranger (usually the 2 door extended cab vesion), and Honda Civics. Time may be playing tricks on me as to what was common at the time, but all of them were smaller.

Slightly shorter, but taller than a Nissan Altima based on specs.

If I may ask, why the hate against pickups?

That’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since my old F-150 decided to start chunking spark plugs through the hood. Been driving a Nissan Altima since. It’s fuel efficient and does the job 80% of the time, but damn, is it a pain in the ass when a random project pops up unexpectedly. It’s been a damned rare month when I haven’t needed to rent either a trailer or a truck (or both) to get something done.

Basically I miss having a truck bed. Can’t say I miss the fuel bill though.

Considering what I want is a 1990’s Ford Ranger or Mazda S-10, and the closest I can get, here in the US, is the overpriced Ford Maverick…

I’m just worried about how much the larger battery pack is going to cost, because I know the price they are claiming is with the smaller pack.

I don’t need something the size, capability, or price of the current F-150 very often, just need a cheap truck that can haul a few 2x4s or sheets of plywood. That hasn’t been available on the market for a long time.