Dude, they are not starting their own ad supported streaming service. They are merely adding dupport for one more streaming protocol that happens to be used for that. If these services were using RTSP for their streams, they'd already be supported. This is absolutely in line with VLC's swiss army knife-approach.
Otherwise, new GUI sounds good to me. The old one is proven but a bit clunky.
Not exactly a charity per se, but many open software projects are in dire need of funding. If there is a piece of software you really like that makes your life easier, consider donating.
Otherwise, stuff like the Trevor Project or similar sound great.
There's Syncthing and it's proprietary counterpart Resilio that allow you to sync folders between machines and send individual files over p2p. Very neat software.
I am very happy with mine and have only ever had one hiccup during updating that was due to my Dockerfile removing one dependency to many. I've run it bare metal (apache, mariadb) as well as containerized (derived custom image, traefik, mariadb). Both were okay in speed after applying all steps from the documentation.
Having the database on your fastest drive is definitely very important. Whenever I look at htop while making big copies or moves, it's always mariadb that's shuffling stuff around.
In my opinion there are 2 things that make nextcloud (appear) slow:
Managing the ton of metadata in the db that is used by nextcloud to provide the enhanced functionality
It is/was a webpage rendered mostly on the server.
The first issue is hard to tackle, because it is intrinsic and also has different optimums for different deployment scales. Optimizing databases is beyond my skillset and therefore I stick to the recommendations.
The second issue is slowly being worked around, because many applications on nextcloud now resemble SPAs, that are highly interactive and are rendered by your browser. That reduces page reloads and makes it feel more smooth.
All that said, I barely use the webinterface, because I rarely use the collaboration features. If I have to create a share I usually do that on the app because that's where I send the link to people. Most of my usecase is just syncing files, calendars and contacts.
That might be due to your ISP's routing and interconnects. They usually have good routes to big services and might lack good connections between home users in different countries or on different continents.
That's the biggest pain point with Signal and WhatsApp in my opinion. Telegram does it, but then of course it's much easier for them to support. Sharing content from my tablet is such a hassle.
Whenever a new hype is going around I like to think back about the 3D printing craze and how little is left of all the glorious promises.
They are cool and a neat way of manufacturing things, but what they are absolutely not is magic machines.
AI/ML will find it's niche and will allow for new and even exciting things, but it won't be the end-all-be-all in it's current form. It's an overgrown version of statistics after all.
I did too, but shortly after decommissioning that server the drive became unresponsive. I really dodged a bullet without even realizing at the time. SMART data did not work and may have alerted me in that case.
Also, unrelated to SMART data, the server failed to do reboots because the USB-SATA adapter did not properly reset without a full power cycle (which did not happen with that mainboard's USB on reboots). It always git stuck searching for the drive. Restarting the server therefore meant shutting it down and calling someone to push the button for me - or use Wake-On-LAN which thankfully worked but was still a dodgy workaround.
First, Telegram messages are only "transport-encrypted", meaning that the messages are safe while in transport from you to Telegram and from Telegram to the recipient of your message. Very importantly, these messages are not encrypted while Telegram has them! Even WhatsApp has better and more encryption than that (Called End-to-End encryption, only sender and recipient can read a message).
Therefore, you have to trust Telegram not to look at your messages (they certainly do) while other services simply can't.
Second, at least here in Germany Telegram has become the main platform for conspiracy nuts and antidemocratic organizations. Someone who is "very active" on Telegram is most certainly an idiot.
How would they earn money on this? It's still a FOSS project. They are simply revamping their GUI and adding support for one more protocol.
Plex is NOT FOSS! Plex is a private company's cash cow.