In some countries, it is also illegal to engage in self-hosting.

Really?! Can you elaborate?

If we don’t make these sovereign nodes as easy as a light switch

That’s a long row to hoe. However, I see a lot of very capable mini-servers using Lenovo and that makes me feel better. We live in a digital world now where real life and digital life are co-blended. I’ve always felt that in this digital world, each and every household should have a server. If I were a much younger man, I’ve often toyed with the idea of setting up mini-server racks to sell. But, I’m far beyond being a younger man now, and so I hope some young entrepreneur will bring that to fruition.

I’ve spent a lot of time teaching seniors at a library program

You are a better man than I Gunga Din. I’ve had a computer in front of me since the mid 70s, but a lot of my brethren shit on the notion of computers, giving that ‘…back in my day we didn’t need computers’, and the standard ‘uphill both ways in the snow’ trope. That’s a hard nut to crack because you have to want to learn before you can learn. I know people my age can learn. They damn sure don’t have much problem learning Facebook or TikTok. LOL

The Kiwix Library is chock full of options: https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng

I need to get a backup of some encyclopedias and/or get wikipedia somewhere hosted. That would be fun and informative.

I selfhost the full Wikipedia in Kiwix, plus a decent amount of IT, Political, History reading material in my Calibre library. I’m not much for fiction, novels, or movies.

Maybe I’m mistaken, maybe it’s all really easy even for noobs

I’ll be the first to admit, shit is complicated, especially networking, but it’s not insurmountable. Do you already have a server deployed? How familiar are you with Linux?

See what you think: https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/

What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?

As with any privacy, security, and anonymity efforts, it takes work. Nothing I am doing can’t be accomplished by someone else once the work is put in because I possess no special skills or certs on my wall to reflect any special skills. Just reading a lot, doing, screwing it up, rinse/repeat ad nauseam. We live in a world of convenience, where ‘someone else’ does the work and we capitalize on their efforts, and it’s this point where I see most people falling off the wagon.

Additionally, the average Joe really doesn’t have a firm grasp on what happens between the time you click a link in your browser to the time it returns with your webpage. They definitely don’t realize the preponderance of traffic being generated even on a PC at rest. They may see adverts taking up real estate on their computer screen, but no clue about what’s going on behind the pretty graphics. To them it’s akin to advertising on a billboard, which it’s far more insidious.

Then there’s the obligatory ‘I’m not technologically inclined’, especially from those in my generation of old heads who are stubborn cusses for the most part. However, for the younger, upwardly mobile, youngsters, there is the element of time. For the average family in this economy, it takes both adults working to make ends meet. They get up every morning, go to work, come home exhausted, spend a little quality time with the kids, and it’s off to collapse in bed, only to do it over and over again. On the weekends, there are extracurricular activities for the kids, quality time with the family, catching up on any household chores…and then it’s Monday. They don’t have the time nor the inclination to learn how to stand up a Linux server.

I’ve got a couple friends who bought the equipment, and I set it all up for them, and administer any thing remotely. It does become a headache sometimes. Users cause issues. Luckily it’s only a couple.

my 2p

My server and associated peripherals run me $30+/- monthly. I recently did some adjustments with the help of tlp and a few other apps to see if I could slim that down a few dollars. I’m waiting until the end of the month to do some comparisons. All in all tho, $30 is probably well below what most people would spend on any other hobby.

Sure. I mean, it apparently does exactly what they describe. Maybe someone will fork it into something useful. Seems to me it could be a basis for something to be built on. Damn site better than anything I’ve managed to code, so I can’t knock it too much. LOL

Hmmmm…sorry to steer you wrongly. I mean, gosh it says it does all annotation and collaboration. I assumed ‘collaboration’ to mean multi-user collaboration. Hard to collaborate by yourself.

Same. pfsense will filter a lot of spam with Spamhaus_Drop type feeds. Then T-Bird with a lot of rules for different sorting options. Also, I use a lot of alias email addresses so those are easy to filter right into the trash can. It’s interesting to watch who sells my aliases.

At the same time, I watched Reddit’s self-hosted community – whose members are well-known for writing off projects at the first sight of emojis – blindly dive headfirst into Hypermind, a new peer-to-peer app for discovering and counting other users also deploying the app (yes, you read that correctly).

I had the same reaction.

I try to keep lawyers, government, and other ne’er-do-wells off my farm, yes.

Stirling PDF

https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/Functionality/Read-and-Annotate/

Read & Annotate is a full-featured PDF viewer that lets you:

• Read PDFs in a clean, focused interface
• Add annotations, comments, and notes
• Highlight and markup text
• Draw freehand on pages
• Add shapes, arrows, and callouts
• Insert text boxes and sticky notes
• Collaborate by marking up documents
• Save annotated PDFs for sharing

Think of it as your digital PDF notepad - read, review, and mark up documents all in one place.

It says it do. Other than that, I’ve never deployed it.

I don’t use PDFs that much either, and often wonder who are these people who use so many PDFs, but I hear raves about Stirling PDF. I thought PDFs were like legacy gen.

You could run FreshRSS on a RPi: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-freshrss/

Then interface that with your network. Heck, you could probably go down to your local Goodwill or Computer Resell shop and pick up something.

Serving audio files is pretty easy as long as you don’t have a million people trying to DL a new 5GB episode simultaneously.

I wonder if that could be rate limited with some mechanism when OP blows up?

I haven’t streamed audio to a server in a decades since I ran an internet radio station pre-napster. We were using ShoutCast servers paid for by IM Radio Networks (now defunct) then. All we had to do was pay for ASCAP/SEASAC,BMI, SOCAN etc license coverage. It wasn’t a podcast tho, but rather 24/7 broadcast. With few thousand people tuning in every day, we ate up some serious bandwidth I can tell you.

/end reminiscing

Oh snap! Man, you didn’t have to do all that just for one dipshit who didn’t understand what Mixarr was. I should have done a bit more reading. I feel embarrassed. I will spin this up in an hour or two when I get my chores done. Thank you so much!

Because I’m a dumbass who didn’t really understand what was going on. Kindly disregard the doddering old man.

Connects to Lidarr

So, I don’t run the ‘arr stack’, and am not interested in downloading, but I would like recommendations on new music. I am running Navidrome which scrobbles to Listenbrainz. How would Mixarr fit into this scenario?

So, what is/are the advantage(s) of running a single user Lemmy instance? Privacy? Security? Anonymity? Curious since it seems there are people who do.