Bright Spark

Not in terms of the recommendations, but if you want a client for Subsonic or Jellyfin that is close to the Spotify UI, then I can recommend Sonixd.

I actually started giving my home Mastodon instance 8 bucks a month as a little “thank you” for hosting and maintaining it, because I think they’re doing a solid job at keeping the place wholesome and curbstomping less wholesome instances, and keeping it up and running.

Also, I pay the subscription for Home Assistant/Nabu Casa, because I think it’s worth for having a locally-hosted home automation platform that is completely independant from any cloud provider, but can make use of cloud features if need be. Yes, I could set up my own SSL certificate for the instance, and set up the connection to Google Home manually, and run a completely local TTS (which I actually have as a backup in case the connection drops), but there, I pay for the convenience on top of supporting the developers a little bit.

And before I switched to Jellyfin, I was happily using Plex and paid for the Plex Pass.

Well, it requires some more work, but you can also in theory set up a Linux box (or, heck, also a Windows one if you are so inclined) and use something like Electron Player (https://github.com/oscartbeaumont/ElectronPlayer) as a “frontend” for YouTube TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix,…

…or you tell Netflix Amazon and co. to stuff it, buy BluRays, rip them onto a media server, and set up Jellyfin, Emby, Plex… or, heck, just a fileshare and play the files using Kodi or something.

…nah.

The Metaverse is just a buzzword, with my favorite example of the new Tamagotchis just slapping it onto their newest line of virtual critter to mean “Yeah, it has basic online functionalities”. NFTs can go shove it. It’s for money laundering at best, and scam artists enriching themselves with minimal effort at worst. Cryptocurrencies may have a use in theory, but not for the environmental impact they cause. Same with the blockchain.

The future - I personally believe/hope - belongs to free, decentralized online services that anyone can host themselves if they so please and have the skills.

That is what Web 3.0 should be. None of that artificial scarcity bullcrap.

I use RSnapshot and make incremental backups to an external harddrive, and (I know it’s not a backup) run my two RAIDs (one for media, one for general data) in mirrored mode.

When I eventually upgrade my home server, I will upgrade from 2x2 2TB drives in RAID1 to four 8TB drives in either RAID5 or 6 - I am still undecided if I am willing to sacrifice 4TB of capacity to the redundancy gods and get an extra harddrive that can fail without data loss in return.

On my “home server” (an old office PC we were about to throw into the junk at work that I installed OpenMediaVault on):

• Portainer (Docker container manager)
• AdGuard Home (DNS-based ad blocker)
• Audiobookshelf (Audiobook library)
• Bitwarden (Password manager)
• Jellyfin (Media server)
• Kavita (eBook library)
• LetsEncrypt + NGINX (SSL cert + reverse proxy)
• Nextcloud (cloud storage, notes, calendar, contact and browser bookmark sync)

And on my Pi 4:

• Home Assistant (smart home management and orchestration)

(EDIT: Apologies for the double post, the post button kept showing the loading throbber, so I thought I may have had connection issues and submitted it again after refreshing the page)