Emotet

I wrote a simple, locally running Webapp some time ago, that targets the Lemmy Import-/Export-API and supports transferring only specific userdata between accounts, as demonstrated in this corresponding Wiki Entry.

The import functionality in Lemmy is additive in nature, meaning anything you import gets added on top of existing settings instead of replacing it.

Does the same thing as these manual instructions for this usecase, may be helpful to some.

Ehhh.

Yeah, compared to a few years ago, it's very much improved and a lot of games, especially those on Steam, run pretty good and in rare cases even better than on their native platform, Windows.

But the pretty much broken state of VR support combined with some annoying bugs that are very hard to troubleshoot even for advanced users, the decision by most AAA and even some smaller studios to actively block Linux clients in multiplayer games via anti-cheat measures and the usual Linux fuckery of HDR, VRR (which hopefully will get better now that Wayland is getting there) and some NVIDIA fuckery (which is also getting better) leads to the following conclusions for me:

1. Linux Gaming is improving.
2. If all you play are some indie titles and/or single-player titles, you may be good.
3. If you want to play in VR, most popular multiplayer titles and rely on features such as HDR and VRR, you'll still need to dual boot into Windows.

I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can fully banish Windows, at least from my private machines. I'm very tolerant towards debugging and living on the bleeding edge, if that is needed. But I don't see the need for Windows for PC gaming to go away anytime soon for most users and, frankly, writing love letters to Linux Gaming without mentioning even some hurdles can, has and will take new Linux users by surprise and turn them off. Communicating transparently, so the user can make their own informed decisions, is a better strategy.

What fer0n probably was hinting at (and I agree with): Yeah, there are some people, especially concentrated in bubbles like Lemmy, who care a lot about privacy, security, ownership (soft and hard) and all that good stuff.

But if, for example, Meta releases a product for price x and a privacy-conscious company releases functionally the same product, but with a truly open system, for 200 bucks more, most people outside our bubble (and even a lot inside) will buy the Meta product.

Why?

Because they don't care about anything but short-term functionality. And, in a lof of minds, if they'll get the same functionality for cheaper elsewhere, they'd be pretty stupid to not buy that one.

Folks in general couldn't give less of a fuck about their privacy and ethics in products and services they buy and use. Usability, Features and Service reign supreme.

Meta Horizon OS is Android. Full of bloat and telemetry, but Android nonetheless. Unlocking ADB and sideloading isn't trivial, but officially supported.

I'd appreciate it very much!

Great suggestion to secure the backups themselfes, but I'm more concerned about the impact an attacker on my network might have on the external network and vice versa.

That'd be the gold standard. Unfortunately, the external network utilizes infrastructure that doesn't support specifying firewall rules on the existing separate VLAN, so all rules would have to be applied on the Pi itself or on yet another device between, which is something I'd like to avoid. Great general advice, though!

Even skipping the point of travelling between star systems in the future, as that is highly doubtful at best, that's not a principle I subscribe to.

It's usually way more economical to go for scale rather than individualism, let's look at some examples.

Travelling by bus or train is way cheaper and more efficient than travelling by car. Travelling by cruise ship/ferry is way cheaper and more efficient than getting your own boat. Travelling by passenger plane is way cheaper and more efficient than travelling by business jet which in turn is more efficient than getting your own little plane, which might not even be able to get you where you want to go.

Generally, especially when involving long distances and the material needs associated with it, having a big enough vessel to share the costs and limit the need to restock (en route) to a minimum.

Bar safety, logistical and cost concerns, we could already cram a nuclear reactor in a car or a bus. We don't because it simply doesn't make sense.

I see no reason why that logic wouldn't apply to some magical device that would enable interstellar travel, even if it would be able to instantly teleport you to your location without having enormous energy requirements.

If you share a WiFi connection with an attacker at a coffee shop, for example, there are certain attacks they can execute to see the unencrypted parts of your Internet communications (e.g., the domain names of the websites you visit) and interfere with your communications to carry out other advanced attacks against you. Typically, security experts recommend the use of a VPN to protect against attackers with whom you share a WiFi connection. Our research reveals that using a VPN opens you up to similar attacks from other VPN users with whom you share your VPN server. In the same way that the WiFi radio signal is a shared resource that makes users vulnerable to attacks, there is a shared resource on VPN servers called a port (each connection through the VPN server is assigned to a port). By carefully crafting packets from within the attacker’s own connection to the VPN server and from a remote Internet location controlled by the attacker, it is possible to carry out attacks on other VPN users who are using the same VPN server in a manner that is very similar to the attacks that could be carried out on shared WiFi. We call this attack primitive a port shadow because the attacker shadows their own information on a victim’s port as a shared resource, and this attack primitive can lead to snooping of unencrypted data, port scans, or connection hijacking.

While this is a great approach for any business hosting mission critical or user facing ressources, it is WAY overkill for a basic selfhosted setup involving family and friends.

For this to make sense, you need to have access to 3 different physical locations with their own ISPs or rent 3 different VPS.

Assuming one would use only 1 data drive + an equal parity drive, now we're talking about 6 drives with the total usable capacity of one. If one decides to use fewer drives and link your nodes to one or two data drives (remotely), I/O and latency becomes an issue and you effectively introduced more points of failure than before.

Not even talking about the massive increase in initial and running costs as well as administrive headaches, this isn't worth it for basically anyone.