It can be fine, I’m using a comparable machine, you have to do the math for whether the power bills are worth it. What cpu does it have and how hard do you plan to run it?

Also a good choice. I’ve never used Elixir but have used Erlang. Elixir is just Erlang with different surface syntax, pretty much. https://learnyousomeerlang.com is a good way to start with Erlang.

I won’t say “better” but Perl 6 is … interesting. It’s not clear what version you’re using.

I suggest Haskell as your next language instead of Perl, since it will change how you think. https://learnyouahaskell.com is a good place to start.

A physical token only authenticates itself as “something you have” if there’s no way to extract the key from it. In practice non-hardcore deployments usually have a backup procedure but in principle, if you want multiple tokens, they should have separate keys. What you’re asking in simplest form involves storing the key on a server where it can potentially spill in a server breach or the like. If the key protects something very valuable, that can be dangerous. If it’s for your old Reddit account, you might decide to do it anyway.

It’s considered bad form to do what you’re asking but most 2fa apps have a backup restore scheme now. Is that enough?

It’s a trade off between video quality and bandwidth but you can set the ffmpeg parameters to the bandwidth you want, more or less. If you have 2mbits up you can do ok. Motion detection can help if it’s for security and not much is happening most of the time.

If you have enough upload bandwidth I guess you don’t need the vps.

It always seems simplest to do this stuff with raspberry pi cameras or cheap webcams, and wired networks if feasible. Then use ffmpeg and icecast to stream through a VPS. Anything made as a consumer product is likely a shambles of crap software and security holes.

Raspberry pi cameras aren’t that bad a deal.

If it’s from a memorable phrase, then the phrase has a lot of redundancy and it’s hard to estimate the actual entropy. Generating a random phrase and writing it on a slip of paper works for me. Keep the paper in your pocket and refer to it when you need to, instead of trying to memorize it. Once you’ve typed it into the computer a few times, you remember it automatically. At that point you can swallow the paper or use your favorite alternate secure disposal method ;).

Nobody remembers diceware?

Do you want something that also has CDN like Cloudflare? Bunny.net is good, but way more expensive than a cheap VPS if you use a lot of traffic.

I wouldn’t bother with the Fiverr thing but interesting personal projects and FOSS contributions are both good. Sizeable FOSS projects mean you’re working with other people which brings both benefits and challenges, and more closely resembles the “job” world. You could also look for actual paying work (not gig work like Fiverr, that is crap) if you have the time for it (summer job might be possible). Look at the monthly “Who is hiring” thread (first weekday of each month) on news.ycombinator.com, look on craigslist, etc.

Getting involved in FOSS is pretty simple. Find a project with a list of open tasks or an issue tracker, find something that interests you, say you are interested in working on that task, and start contributing patches. Usually if the project is not a high-visibility one with a lot of contributors already, it will welcome any help it can get. Lots of such projects have Freenode IRC channels where you can chat with the other devs in real time. I’m less comfortable with the ones that use Discord, but that’s just me.

If the battery isn’t in a commodity form factor that you can easily change yourself, it’s not BIFL, sorry.

Do you mean it downloads all the posts whether you read them or not? Is that basically running your own instance?

Plain text or org mode file.

When a user uploads an image or video on Mastodon instance 1, and a user of Mastodon instance 2 is following them, that image or video is copied over to Mastodon instance 2 - because that’s where that user resides.

The same thing happens with text posts, right? I don’t see an exponential expansion, just linear in the number of nodes. It sounds like the decentralized way to do things. Hmm. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. It saves some storage but doesn’t save bandwidth, it sounds like. Rather, the bandwidth requirement gets concentrated at the shared server.

CDN’s are quite expensive compared to budget VPS and e.g. Hetzner storage cloud. Their basic purpose is to give quick delivery to regions far from the server, not really to save cost. I don’t know the story with lemmynsfw. It’s basically an onlyfans marketing platform right? Maybe they have some donation scheme in place behind the scenes. Anyway free porn hosting isn’t so much an issue per se (imgur, tumblr, etc are also that,) but for those who don’t want to host porn, it likely creates nonstop workload to clean it up.

Also, besides porn, it’s sad that this beautiful fediverse that might have become an alternative place for actual humans to interact, turns into another marketing space for corporate media. I’d like to put up a text only server. I don’t know if that’s really doable with current fediverse types. But why try to recreate reddit and imgur and maybe youtube? Those all already exist.

Flac for me has been about half the size of wav, at least for normal 16 bit 44 khz audio. Maybe it’s worse at higher bit depth? Anyway bulk storage is pretty cheap. You could have Flac in your archive while keeping ogg or whatever on your everyday playback device.

Can someone explain what this is for? I’m basically unfamiliar with the non Lemmy parts of the fediverse. I had thought Mastodon was like Twitter so I don’t understand what a federated media server is supposed to do. It just sounds destined to turn into free pr0n hosting and then get shut down. But who knows.