The more the merrier. Yes, there will be more shit content, but there will be more quality content and engagement. Small platforms tend to die or become an echo chamber.
Depends on what you want exactly. Easy and self-hosted are not usually go well together unless you've got enough experience.
Easiest way for blog - use a platform. WordPress.com is great and has free tier.
More involved, but still relatively easy - static site generator. I use Hugo myself, there is Jakyll that is popular too. Host it for free on GitHub or GitLab pages.
I would not self-host a public web site for security reasons. But you can run a static site on some cloud service. A personal blog with small audience should be fine on Oracle free tier.
Some stuff is in Joplin, some stuff is in wiki.js.
Joplin lacks organization features. Wiki.js stores stuff in database and has problems with search, both are possible to fix, I believe...
Occasionally I remember about problems with this setup, but I'm too lazy to fix or replace it
It's like governments and corporations are competing at control over information flows. In EU bureaucracy wins more often, and in US corpo lobbyists win more often.
I used to invent "funny" names, but at some point it became a chore and I also found I'm forgetting some names or spelling when I need it.
Call me boring, but doing enterprise system admin jobs for years I recently started to adopt functional naming convention.
This is what I have now:
[location code][OS code][type vm/ct][environment code][workload][index]
So the first production DB linux VM in my primary Los Angeles location will be named LA1LVMPDB1
And my second test Nextcloud container hosted in the same location will be named LA2LCTTNC2.
I still have to invent short names for workload, which is harder for specialized containers, but overall this makes it all more manageable.
I mostly support this opinion.
Bot-only communities should not be allowed on lemm.ee instance. We can add this to instance rules and throw out such communities.
I'm not against repost bots per se, but I'd allow them only if a community has more people posts than bot posts.
For user data on my PC and on home server I mostly use Duplicacy. It is fast and efficient.
All data backed up locally on NAS box over SFTP, and a subset of that data is backed up to S3 cloud storage.
I have a Mac, this one is using TimeMachine, storing data on NAS, then it's synced to S3 cloud storage one a day.
And on top of that VMs and containers from home server are backed up by Proxmox built in tool to NAS. These mostly exclude user data.
I see that some folks here suggest that a change in how taxes are reported is a solution to this.
For me it sounds weird. The problem is with having big tech trackers deployed on most web sites by site owners who don't care about privacy implications. It doesn't look like tax prep firms are profiting from user data, it's just their negligence.
I hope that they will do a good thing and replace these invasive trackers with something better.
But meanwhile, people can use their desktop software. I've seen H&R block software a few years back - it was slightly buggy, but it worked. I don't think they put Meta trackers there.
I'm not zealous about it... I'm selling my privacy for 1.5% cashback to banks and for 5% to Amazon!
However, I'm consolidating my banking to fewer banks than earlier. And I stopped using services that aggregate financial accounts to provide insights - budgeting, projections, investment advice, etc.
On the other hand I use Privacy.com for smaller vendors, but more often for security reasons than privacy.
Monero for some services, like VPN.
Also, no real name or address in store loyalty programs.
Not my solution, but I liked an idea and thinking to use it too - copy backups on external HDD and put it into your car trunk. Maybe have two drives in rotation.
It eliminates a need to drive somewhere for rotation, and any cost of renting a safebox.
Doesn't protect from a serious disaster like forest fire or earthquake or nuclear war, but I keep the most important data in cloud, and if my house and car burns I would be having other problems than worrying about some homelab snapshots.
As another person mentioned Fitbit belongs to Google. If you are an Android user chances are Google knows who you are and can correlate Fitbit user account with your identity.
Use more private device with 3rd party fitness app
Yes, because 5 year old child is not supposed to venture away from school.