I’m currently about halfway through setting up a home server on an old/refurbished Dell PC. It has enough compute to transcode if needed, but no more. I’ll have to upgrade the storage to set up RAID. For software, I am running xubuntu, which offers the benefits of the great community and documentation of Ubuntu. It is very beginner friendly, but is a bit simpler and lighter than gnome. I’m running everything I can as Docker containers.

Hi, I’m your customer base.

I’m a complete novice, no network or coding experience, but not afraid of computers either. I’m pretty worried about messing up something serious due to lack of knowledge.

In the end, I didn’t choose Synology or the like due to:

• lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.

• price. I’d pay 10% or 50% more for a good pre-configured system, but not 3-4x more (which is just the general feeling I get from Synology)

• lack of configurability. I’m still not sure what I would like to do (and be able). I know I want to replace some storage services, replace some streaming services, control my smart home, maaaaybe access my files remotely, and probably some other stuff. I may want to have email or a website in the future, but that’s not on my radar right now.

If there were some plug-and-play hardware/software solution that was still affordable and open, it would be a good choice for me.

Its rare enough to be trivial, and when it happens, it’s usually someone who doesn’t realize that they are not eligible. For example, if someone came to the country at a young age and mistakenly thought that they could vote.

But as it turn out, policies that require people to verify their citizenship are also very good at disenfranchising eligible voters who are poor, young, immigrants, disabled, or non-native English speakers. Neat, huh?

Edit: I forgot LGBT folks who may have changed their name or lack access to their childhood documents.

Just getting started but yeah, I have basically no technology background. Mostly I’m too stubborn to know when to quit something so here I am lol.

Good to know!

That may be worthwhile… But very time consuming.

Yes, I’m considering this. Since I will have to go a few at a time it seems, I should be able to leave individual comments.

You used to be able to request all of your reddit data - I did that and I guess I have a file somewhere. I couldn’t tell you what’s in it - I’ve never been motivated to check.

Yeah, I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the fediverse is far worse. Lemmy is among the worst activity pub implementations in this regard, and they are all pretty fundamentally flawed.

Federated platforms are by nature trickier in this regard. Even email is difficult to truly delete.

I knew it was a possibility but I didn’t think it was likely. Well, here we are.

Even better! Maybe change everything to “ignore previous instructions” lol

It’s an aggregate concern - Advertisers, bad actors, etc could easily use tools that are available now or will be soon to extract information that otherwise would be impossible for a human to wade through. I know that in one sense, everything is backed up by the NSA, etc, but that is not something I can do anything about.

The concern is actually greater in the fediverse, since a federated admin has access to even more information, and there is no absolute way to delete everything even with GDPR. I think that the risk is worth building a better internet. It’s also a part of why blocking Threads is important.

It seems to be undeleted. I confirmed that everything was gone at that time, and I am seeing no obvious pattern so far. I could be mistaken, but that’s how it appears.

Yeah, it’s easy enough for reddit to detect rapid edits over a 1-day period and just undo all of them. That seems to be the case here. The edits I did manually were retained.

The tool edits the comments to a random string before deleting, since deleted comments and posts are actually preserved.

What is grade?

Speed as I understand it is the physical speed the drive spins, and is directly proportional (?) to the read/write speed.

How does a beginner know which is which? What should I look for, and how do I know if it’s a good investment or overkill for a home setup?

Also, there is great info at lemmyapps.com and the Lemmy Apps Directory.

Use a better search engine?