What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.

I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.

Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.

I’m sure there are flakes that can do that, but I just use the config file, adding things as I find I need them. Flakes weren’t really all that well documented when I first installed it so I never messed around with them. Out of box though, it was fairly decent for relatively simple needs. If I remember correctly, the graphical install could set you up with any of a half dozen different DEs out of the box.

One heads up. While NixOS is a Linux distribution, it is radically different design philosophy from every other Linux distribution I’ve ever used. In some ways better and far easier to setup and maintain, and sometimes, as headache inducing as Gentoo or Arch. Once you have it setup to your liking, though, it has proven incredibly solid and hard to break.

Here’s a redacted copy of my configuration.nix file. I really need to clean it up, reorganize, and remove things I’m not using anymore, but it’s what I’m running on my desktop. Basically hasn’t changed since KDE6 came out something like a year ago. I think the last change I made after that was when I finally added flatpak support.

https://pastebin.com/8G7Hv4y2

Might take a look at NixOS. Releases every 6 months and you can pick your DE.

Possibly. I don’t remember that being an option when I was setting things up last time.

From what I’m reading it’s sounding like it’s just acting as a slightly simplified DNS server/reverse proxy for individual services on the tailnet. Sounds Interesting. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to use on the backend (what happens if Tailscale goes down? Does that DNS go down too?), but for family members I’ve set up on the tailnet, it sounds like an interesting option.

Much as I like Tailscale, it seems like using this may introduce a few too many failure points that rely on a single provider. Especially one that isn’t charging me anything for what they provide.

In my case, most things that I didn’t explicitly make public are running on Tailscale using their own Tailscale containers.

Doing it this way each one gets their own address and I don’t have to worry about port numbers. I can just type http://cars/ (Yes, I know. Not secure. Not worried about it) and get to my LubeLogger instance. But it also means I have 20ish copies of just the Tailscale container running.

On top of that, many services, like Nextcloud, are broken up into multiple containers. I think Nextcloud-aio alone has something like 5 or 6 containers it spins up, in addition to the master container. Tends to inflate the container numbers.

When others in your particular nitch are not posting. You may have a slightly better chance to trend that way.

I’m also on SDF’s Mastodon server. Fairly small and largely general purpose. Seems to have pretty good uptime.

Burned, was probably a Linux ISO about 15 years ago. I still prefer to buy physical media (CDs and DVDs), just haven’t had a need to burn any in a while.

I have a ligit account I play with.

However, you can play in offline mode using Prism Launcher. Doesn’t require a Microsoft account. If you put up a personal Minecraft server, you can disable account checking. I’ve never tried it though.

I use FinAmp client with Jellyfin for music.

I agree the Jellyfin interface is not well optimized for music, but FinAmp negates most of that and my phone is how I mostly listen to music anyway.

I like Navidrone, but it’s a duplicate service that doesn’t really have a big value add over Jellyfin beyond the ability to share tracks with friends. A major feature upgrade, but not something I use terribly often.

And iOS app as well, though, it is in test flight

Off the top of my head:

• Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
• Immich (Google Photos replacement)
• Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
• LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
• Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
• Jellyfin (Primary media server)
• Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
• Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
• Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
• Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.

Living in the US South for the last 30 years, my experience has been that most of the "Don’t tread on me " crowd are very much only interested in protecting themselves and their families. That often means keeping your head low when trouble is about.

Additionally, ICE seems to have been keeping a low profile in areas where that mindset is most prevalent. Still active, but keeping their wits about them.

Sooner or later, though, ICE will fuck up, knock down the wrong door, and multiple people (both ICE and citizens) will catch a bad case of lead poisoning. And then things will get bad.

Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.

I’ve been using Private Email as my email provider. I think it’s owned by NameCheap, my domain registrar. While I’m interested in a decent spam solution for my particular setup, I was just as interested in hearing how everyone else handles their spam. And their choices for getting email, as it turns out.

I’ve gotten a lot more responses from people running their own email servers than I really expected. Back in the day it was considered a herculean challenge, almost impossible for your mail to be accepted by the big 3 email providers.

From the other responses I’ve gotten so far, it sounds like most email providers, including mine, might have decent built- in spam filtering. Others are saying to look into aliases. both are sounding like good plays going forward.

Gmail’s excellent spam filtering was the main reason I had switched to them way back when. When I moved away from them, I just never looked at it, assuming spam filtering at the provider level to be non existent, and used Thunderbird’s junk mail filtering as it was a known way to solve the issue.

One of the problems with getting old is that you wind up getting blind to advances that have happened while you weren’t looking.

I’m a geek who drives a truck and I learned a good chunk of what I know, tech-wise, almost 25 years ago. I try to keep up, but falling behind on tech just kinda goes with the territory.

You can’t post a video directly, but you can link to a video hosted elsewhere.

Matrix would probably be one of the better options, but xmpp is a pretty good choice as well.

Listen to them, and go “okay”. Then if it was helpful, follow the suggestion. More often than not, though, the advice is not helpful. I’ll still listen and go “okay”, and then go and do whatever it is that I thought was best.

Painful truth is that I am not an expert in everything. I don’t know everything. Even having reached middle age, I’ve not experienced everything. But by listening to those around me, I can often learn something. That thing may not always be what the advice giver intended, (often it’s “This person is an idiot”) but learning is good.

The most important piece of information you can ever learn is “Where can I find more information?” Occasionally it’s the annoying asshole that keeps giving unsolicited advice.

Swap mvp with mplayer, and this was my setup for several years before I discovered VLC and then later, setup Jellyfin.

Each cat their own rat.