Maybe there’s more to it, but I really don’t get the last note about Tidal: Essentially, if you use Tidal, you should know the CEO is has a large ego and is a crypto bro.

I’m sure he’s very annoying, but I’m not inviting him to my house for dinner.

I use authentik and like it. The learning curve isn’t that steep so not a lot of wasted investment if you decide to ditch it for something else. No password flow with webauthn is pretty cool.

Like most things, it depends on your jurisdiction and the policies of your ISP. But as a general rule, yes, you should take steps to hide your IP.

Probably a good case example is to look at how many people in your area were sued for torrenting. For example, the rights holders to Dallas Buyer’s Club famously went nuclear on torrenters, so maybe start by searching that. Of course none of this is legal advice.

PIA is pretty reliable in my experience and their three year plan is quite affordable.

I agree. About 10 years ago I had a some unstable dependencies hit in the middle of a major crunch/product release at work. When it was vital I was productive, I was instead trouble shooting my laptop. I moved to mac the next day and was surprised how far the OS had come, and that I could run zsh, nvim etc. Not to mention since apple silicon its rare I need to take a charger with me anywhere.

I still have a linux thinkpad for personal use, and all my personal servers are linux. My heart is linux, but a lot will have to change to take me away from a macbook.

For what its worth, I’ve been using this container for years and have never had any issues https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/

IMO, you want ram more than you want processing power. 16 gig ought to be enough. Most of the time your containers will sit dormant and just consume memory. However since you want to run Jellyfin, get a recent CPU which can do hardware decoding of popular codecs. There’s charts online that show what generation can handle what codecs. Ideally you don’t want that done by software. You should still be able to find something cheap.

In terms of placement. It depends a lot on noise IMO. If you’re running something small without magnetic storage, you’re probably fine to stick it anywhere. If you have several data-centre grade hard drives, you will probably want to keep it somewhere where you wont hear it all day.

In terms of upgrading, I’m not sure if its as much of a concern as you might think. I run probably about 30 docker containers off a NUC clone and a seperate NAS, and that has worked pretty well for the last few years. I can always add more drives to the NAS, but otherwise its fine. Also, many of my services scale to zero with sablier+traefik, and I schedule filesharing for low bandwidth times. This makes things pretty manageable.

I did the same but joined Tidal for the same reason. Their app isn’t terrible—could do with more features but it’s been robust in my experience.

I’m aware. You may have missed that I made that distinction in my first sentence.

With modern Usenet there are about 8 or so backbones used for file sharing. Your Usenet provider/server would connect to one or more of these backbones.

Its true Usenet is designed for federation, and in the 80s and 90s it was thousands of servers but today commercial Usenet providers just resell these 8 backbones.