Are you using s3 for storage or block storage? S3 is pretty cheap but I’m wondering if Cloudfront would still help me with the load on the ec2 instance when federation traffic is slamming it.

Are you using cloudfront?

I don’t think Steam’s business model works well for Movies/TV. Besides delivering the game files after your initial purchase Steam also continues to host and deliver update files for games over time, as well as lots of extras like syncing game saves, the workshop for mods, etc. I like having a centralized service that offers these features and acts a launcher for games because it’s very convenient. These features are a huge value add that makes the service very attractive over piracy.

But for Movies/TV the main thing I want is the ability to watch the content, at a high quality, on whatever device I want, whenever I want to watch it. Theoretically this shouldn’t be to hard, but with the way all the rights work it’s effectively impossible for any streaming service to offer this. Content gets removed all the time, it’s spread across a ton of different services that all offer a different experience. In a vain attempt to thwart pirates it’s a pain in the ass to watch content offline so it’s unreliable at best.

The only way to get the experience I want with Movies/TV is to pirate the content.

Google Play Music hooked me by letting me upload my entire library. I used Songza to discover new music (playlists curated by real humans).

Google bought Songza and shut it down. Raised the price of Google Music multiple times, forced me over to YouTube Premium, raised the price again multiple times and got rid of everything that made the service appealing.

I’ve been in music limbo since I dropped it entirely and yeah it’s kind of sad.

There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.

Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It’s not like it’s free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.

If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.

Like most things, it’s important to remember what threats you’re trying to protect yourself against.

Are you trying to protect yourself against dropping a USB in a parking lot and someone picking it up? Or are you trying to protect yourself from a nation state?

I switched from docker compose to pure Ansible for deploying my containers. Makes managing config and starting containers across multiple hosts super easy. I considered virtualizing too but decided it didn’t offer me enough advantages. If I ever have an issue with the host OS I just reinstall using a preseed file and then rerun my playbooks and it’s ready to go.

I started using Checkmk recently after it was mentioned here and I really like it. I’d used Zabbix a bit but was annoyed at how much work it took to get it to do what I want. Checkmk was a lot better right out of the box.

I guess because of hacks? It’s not like Facebook is selling data on tor. This point doesn’t make much sense.

This is the right answer. A better backup strategy is an actual backup strategy. Snapshots, drive mirroring, rsync copies, etc aren’t really backups.

I used to. Magnets on old hard drives were better. Any drive I’ve taken apart over the last ten years or so are smaller and more brittle. Not as worth taking apart.

If you’re this concerned you might as well be running Windows in a VM with gpu passthrough.

A surprising amount of people still ask questions about µTorrent and assume it’s still popular. Apparently there was a lot of value in that brand name. But yeah it’s an utter disaster.

qBittorrent is my choice as well. Deluge is also great, along with Transmission.

Yes. If you use Ghostery and are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Privacy Badger. It’s created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is free and open source. Great piece of software.

True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.

No kidding. I’m an Ops guy and I’ve hosted hundreds of web applications professionally and for fun over the years but Lemmy has been one of the more frustrating and brittle experiences I’ve had.

I’ve figured out a few of the quirks by now but I definitely spent a whole afternoon troubleshooting why the front end wouldn’t load at all only to discover the real issue was with Pict-rs.

This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it’s really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.

If you’re just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.

Exactly. It’s like hey… If the corpos take a dump in your mouth you can either leave or you can stick around and complain about the taste. And yet the people who left are the whiners?

I’ve had exactly this same thought. Doing it client-side seems easy enough, it’s just like creating a multi-reddit and then when you want to post you have to choose which instance to post in.

The hard part is probably that these communities will have different moderators and different rules which complicates things substantially.

I really like Kopia. I backup my containers with it, my workstations, and replicate to s3 nightly. It’s great.