If it’s closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn’t require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don’t consider that self-hosted. If the company disappears and the served goes down, its dead. That’s just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without connecting to their servers and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.

That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it’s useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.

I don’t think I’d go that far. I mean it’s pretty difficult to live without a smart phone these days. And there are easier ways to track someone. But yeah, both Google and Apple spy a ton. Google used to not so much of you opted out before they dropped the “don’t be evil” thing and went pure evil. And at least with Android there are alternative operating systems like GrapheneOS that are way more private. But yeah, if you must have no tracking whatsoever, then don’t own any electronic devices with any wireless capabilites since things like traffic cameras track you based on Bluetooth, NFC, and WiFi MAC addresses as well as license plates and they are super easy to hack the whole network and track anyone…which lead to don’t own a car.

Anyway, it’s nearly impossible these days to avoid being tracked. You have to isolate yourself pretty seriously to truly not be tracked.

I run a single instance of Postgres and one of MariaDB on my NAS that all services connect to. And all of my containers store their settings in NFS shares from that NAS and backup most other things to the NAS. This greatly simplifies off-site backups overall when a copy of almost everything critical lives on the NAS.

Of course, the NAS needs to be powerful enough to handle the load, but since settings don’t get changed often and backups are during off hours and NFS has good caching anyway, the DBs are really the only heavy load on the NAS outside of storing and serving media. It has plenty of memory and has two 2.5Gb ports trunked together and a couple of small SSDs for fast caching in addition to the RAID array of HDDs. So it’s easily able to handle all of its file sharing duties as well as hosting the DBs.

Only negative might be that there’s no fail over if the NAS goes down. But I also don’t have a second router, so that’s another even more devastating single point of failure. But since everything critical is backed up to the NAS and then off-site, it’s an acceptable risk considering the cost to properly remediate it and the unlikelihood of major issues outside of times I’m doing maintenance…

LLMs have uses, some of them are even quite intriguing. But they have to be properly trained. You can’t just throw the whole internet at a baby with very little other training and expect them to not be corrupted by random wrong information. Same goes for LLMs though on a much larger scale. Also, they are often configured to give an answer even when the confidence in it being correct is relatively low. Something an expert would never do, they’d consult only specialized information, not just review the top search results on Google. This is one reason why they “hallucinate”. Commercially trained models just aren’t all that useful as a source of information or to correctly complete tasks. And additionally there are extreme ethical concerns about how it gets the information it’s trained on including using hacking botnets to impersonate a human among other things. A person who’s an expert has to review everything in excruciating detail and so most of the time it’s just more cost effective to just consult an expert in the first place. It’s like going to a proverbial used car car salesman and asking how cars work. Sure they might have picked up a fair amount of information from being around mechanics, but some of it is wrong and what they don’t know they’ll just make something up that sounds mostly plausible.

Yeah, email isn’t private, but for me it’s usually that I don’t like my host reading all of my mail to build an profile on me and selling that data. Individual emails in isolation aren’t a big deal, but seeing every email and what company or agency sent it is as problematic as the content even if you encrypt the mail content itself. Emails that I sends I always assume are not private, but that’s a separate issue, IMHO. There’s a lot of private information like what protected classes I am part of, political leanings, places I shop, etc., that can be gathered simply from who sends mail to you and who you send mail to. This is why I self host for most of my email.

That being said I still use gmail as I need a backup option and I use it for things where I don’t want the junk sender to know my domain and spam all of my accounts.

But Proton is really not much more private than Google in several scenarios given their CEO’s stance on several sensitive subjects and willingness to give data on protected classes, journalists, etc., to hostile governments, as an example. They do say they don’t sell your data to ad companies, at least. I don’t know Fastmail at all. And self-hosting is not something I’d recommend if you don’t want to put a lot of time and effort into it. Lots of issues come up like blacklisted VPS IP addresses in addition to the setup itself.

Nah, just freely share all of it with all of the other rich people. Let them get angry and jealous and destroy each other when they realize how much they’re purposely screwing each other over.

ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.

VPSs: around $40/month, though I’m planning to cut back a bit as I’m moving some stuff local.

2 Domains: < $30/year

The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.

Yeah, unfortunately the By Manufacturer list is limited and doesn’t for example include the Meta glasses 0x0D53. So, still isn’t a feasible alternative unless more prefixes are added or the ability to add your own is added.

Thanks, but I couldn’t find a way to set alerts for a set of addresses like the OP app scans for, only for a specific MAC address. Wouldn’t be feasible to enter all possible addresses since that would be many millions of addresses for each manufacturer prefix.

Feel free to suggest similar apps that are privacy friendly (no spying ads, telemetry, or other unwanted “features”) and quick overview of where to enable realtime alerts for specific mac prefixes in the app to mimic this functionality. I’d be interested.

Yeah fdroid would be preferred over precompiled apks actually, since fdroid does the compiling to verify the compiled version doesn’t contain anything not in the code repo and reports stuff that may be unwanted that is in the repo.

Mostly interacting with other people in-person. I left most corporate social media and lost access to Meta explicitly due to a conflict around my viewpoints on what constitutes hate speech against trans people (hint: saying it’s a sickness that needs curing and that justifies cure by torture, eg. conversion therapy, is hate speech). But I lost access to a really active Buy Nothing group in my neighborhood that’s on Facebook as well as several groups that only post their in-person events on Facebook. Really sucks that Meta locked us out not for violating a rule, and thus with no possible appeal, but assumedly because they were surveiling their platform and excluding people who argued against their stance. Or at least that’s the best guess that those who were blocked have for why.

Also, I have been losing a lot of home automation from Nest devices because Alphabet bought them and has decided to force allowing access to data for “AI” training and “law enforcement”/government surveillance. If I could keep the data local, I would still be able to use the devices with Home Assistant, but they only allow using their servers.

Reverse proxy with fail2ban or crowdsec. It’s possible to set up things like Pangolin which ultimately use a VPN between external and internal access points but not at the client, though it takes more setup if you want to use apps over pangolin instead of just the browser.

I have a lifetime pass from many years ago when it was cheap. So I’m not in a huge rush to convert and want to do it right. But I am on the path to converting. I decided to make a major change to my home server infrastructure and it’s still in an experimental stage. Moving from a really old standalone computer I’ve used for. HTPC purposes over the years, currently dedicated to Plex combined with a few raspberry pi’s of various generations for the little stuff, and a single, good NUC for my router, to adding two additional NUCs and eventually upgrading the Plex computer with a more modern processor and video card for ML stuff for Immich and a few other systems that I plan to start using. I’m not just moving from Plex, but also a lot of Google and Nest products.

My dilemma has been Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes. I was trying to set up Kubernetes in a way that is easily repeatable and self documenting, but ended up with lots of manual steps required to install things and lots of things that I had to write my own helm charts for as well as the scripts to install and set up Kubernetes itself on each of the servers. Lots of custom stuff. Docker Swarm would be way easier, but the issue is I’m worried about Docker getting so proprietary these days and swarm mode getting so little attention, and Podman quadlets aren’t self balancing across multiple small servers like swarm. So that’s why I haven’t switched to Jellyfin yet.

Yep, that’s why I left most social media and try to keep things private. Not because i have anything to hide. I just don’t want everything I do, read, and say to be used against me or trigger hate-based attacks. These days everyone has at least one thing that some hate group would target them for since that’s how fascism works. Make everyone an enemy in small subgroups and trigger hate against that small subgroup whenever you need to distract from taking away rights or taking people’s money.

That’s positive at least. I hadn’t looked at that part. Still having the whole dump of data and attacking it locally vs having to query a web server repeatedly for each attempt is a major advantage. This is why I significantly prefer Vaultwarden over a synchronized database, especially if it’s publicly synchronized in a publicly accessible git server or something making it relatively trivial to copy.

The cops maybe, but the agencies are in the pockets of the companies that sell it. And they control the message given to politicians who are also on the pockets of these companies. The companies have no qualms bribing all over the spectrum of politics and haven’t been stopped from doing it up to now. The systems are crap but super expensive for this very reason. The primary cost of the product is the bribes, not the technology. It’s how the industry of road cameras (plate tracking, red light, speed, etc.) has always been.

Yeah, there’s still a risk if you’re exposing the encrypted passwords. For example there is still some risk that governments have backdoors in some kinds of encryption, which of course means other malicious actors do as well. And there’s still brute forcing which is mitigated with a webserver layer in front of the raw data.

But there are lots of existing applications for that like keypass and its forks. Vaultwarden is more about the web services front end to the data than the data storage itself. And a web service benefits from a relational database over a flat file.

Seems funny that they continue to increase the price as that value sharply declines with the limited life left in it.

Yeah, fortunately Vaultwarden has enough users that probably someone will eventually create an extension for it. And in the mean time you just have to make sure to use an old version of the existing extension until that happens. It’s not like the changes in Bitwarden will affect Vaultwarden directly. The old client versions will still work until Vaultwarden changes something.