100%, I’ve been torrenting for my whole life and seriously running Plex/jellyfin for a decade now and only paying $5/Mo for mullvad and don’t have to worry about what service stuff is on - I just get it all.

I recently decided to supercharge my arrstack setup with Usenet (better availability for older stuff, was able to backfill lots of reality TV that only had dead torrents) and even then, since lots of Usenet providers include a VPN that you can use for torrenting, I’m only paying $7 and change per month.

And most of what I spend reoccurring is paid back by friends I’ve shared with buying me drinks and stuff. Easily worth it.

Seconding immich - I host it for my family which makes sharing vacation photos easy since they all have accounts on my instance that can be shared to / from.

Keep in mind that if you set up raid using zfs or btrfs (idk how it works with other systems but that’s what I’ve used) then you also get scrubs which detect and fix bit rot and unrecoverable read errors. Without that or a similar system, those errors will go undetected and your backup system will backup those corrupted files as well.

Personally one of the main reasons I used zfs and now btrfs with redundancy is to protect irreplaceable files (family memories and stuff) from those kinds of errors, as I used to just keep stuff on a hard drive until I discovered loads of my irreplaceable vacation photos to be corrupted, including the backups which backed up the corruption.

If your files can be reacquired, then I don’t think it’s a big deal. But if they aren’t, then I think having scrubs or integrity checks with redundancy so that issues can be repaired, as well as backups with snapshots to prevent errors or mistakes from messing up your backups, is a necessity. But it just depends on how much you value your files.

Ah, I didn’t gather that you were implying that they were doing a partial enforcement so I was confused.

I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.

And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

They don’t appear to be labeling in both the display name and bio, just the bio, so aren’t they breaking the rule?

So it’s basically as federated as a fediverse server with federation turned off lmao

Wouldn’t that only work if your neighbors tv was plugged into Ethernet so that the wifi chip can be free to start a hotspot? I can’t find any info about that so I’m not sure.

I still have a smart TV so I don’t need to have a non smart tv. But I refuse to use smart features for several reasons:

• The built in software is often laggy, ugly, and hard to navigate (mine is from like 2016 so all 3 of these are huge issues for my specific TV but my parents just bought a 2024 model oled and I find their gyro / touchpad / pointer remote to be excruciating to use)
• I hate the idea of getting used to the Samsung apps / os and then feeling like I need to stick with Samsung
• They never seem to support the software very long - my TV pre-dates Samsung’s current tv OS and no longer receives updates, so the Plex app available for it doesn’t even connect - so I couldn’t use it even if I wanted to

I mostly watch stuff downloaded to my Plex, so a PC running Plex htpc / desktop or any android box (Nvidia shield is pretty good) with the Plex or jellyfin app is all I need. I also like that I can easily watch YouTube through a browser with ad block and sponsorblock (I think smarttube does that for Android boxes like the shield)

I also game on the PC so I guess you could consider it a game console for the purposes of categorizing the use case.

The nice thing about Samsungs is that basically all their remotes work with all their TVs, so I just found one without the smart button so I can’t tell that mine is smart, and I obviously never connected it to internet. I think it’s a lot cheaper than trying to get a commercial dumb TV too.

Gotcha, currently I just pay $5/mo for mullvad but I’ve considered adding usenet to the mix in case it can find a few missing episodes here and there. But I would be basically doing that only for my friends because all of the stuff I watch is popular, recent, and on streaming sites so I don’t have any issues finding it on public indexers.

Doesn’t usenet usually cost money too though? I see them as about equivalent, it’s just that I already need a VPN to access certain porn sites in my state so I might as well use the same subscription and torrent for free instead of adding another cost.

I see, but couldn’t they just sign up for a provider and then hook up their bots to the same search that you use? Or is the search obfuscated for you too? In other words how do they obfuscate it for the bots but not for the customers? That’s what I never really understood - if the answer is just that the people running the bots are just too lazy to hook them up through the same unobfuscated search that paying customers use then that makes sense, but I always assumed there was more of a barrier since Usenet seems to have evaded legal action since forever.

What stops Usenet from being attacked legally in the same way, aren’t they straight up hosting copyrighted content? I’ve always stuck to torrents because it seemed more decentralized, especially if you use DHT instead of an indexer.

This is the main reason I always preferred running my own arrstack over paying for realdebrid. Besides mullvad VPN going out of business suddenly (which wouldn’t be that hard to switch) or taking down all torrent indexes simultaneously, there is no service that can be taken down using the law that would interrupt my media consumption. And even if all torrent sites went down tomorrow, I can trivially hook back up my arrstack to a dht crawler and ill be basically fully decentralized, pulling infohashes from the ether and downloading using purely P2P technologies with no (practical) central point of failure.

In addition to the possibility of reinforcement bars it could also have to do with the thickness of the tactile pad or it could have recessed spots underneath (to save on material if it was injection molded) that could create an insulating air gap.

Does it take a while to get the email after signing up? I tried to create an account. I find the tiktok experience interesting enough to try but was always put off by how intrusive their algorithm seemed.

ensuring greater security and privacy for users

Don’t worry guys, they’re just concerned for the users security and privacy

Hmm interesting, so I guess even though I can see this hours old post, my comment should arrive in several days time. Hopefully I haven’t responded to anyone on world with anything important recently.

My primary use case is safeguarding my important personal artifacts (family photos, digitized paperwork, encryption key / account recovery / 2FA backups) against drive failure (~2TB), followed by my decently sized Plex server (23TB), immich, nextcloud, and various other small things like selfhosted bitwarden, grocy, ollama, and stuff like that.

I run all of my stuff off of a 6 bay Synology (more drives helps with capacity efficiency as double redundancy with 6 drives costs you 30% and I wanted to be protected against drive failures during rebuilding) with an Intel nuc on top to run plex/jellyfin transcoding using quicksync instead of loading the poor nas with cpu transcoding, I also run ollama on the nuc since it has faster cores than the nas.