My needs are simple:

• not a libshit hellhole
• federates with other cool instances and mastodon.social cuz that's the biggest one

There is no apt tech sub on Lemmygrad, and this issue is an annoyance to many right now, I believe, especially during downtime.

Written by yours truly, enjoy. Education is also important for your computing life.

I've recently downloaded mullvad. I heard it's popular in the piracy community. 5 dollars a month is not bad. Currently saving for a good antivirus. What are your favorites?

Now that I have started this community off with a non-technical post, I will share my own, personal solution to digital privacy. This post will be more technical.

I self-host every service I possibly can from a cluster of servers (mostly low-power ARM SBCs) that are in my room. Until recently, I was just manually throwing services onto servers and then manually configuring everything. As I've mentioned before in a GenZedong General Discussion Thread, I am now using an orchestrator called Nomad as well as a service discovery solution called Consul.

This allows me to submit a single configuration file, and my servers all automatically configure themselves to perform whatever task I wanted them to. I've placed all my configuration files along with relatively detailed READMEs about them into this repository if anyone wants to take a look at them: https://gitea.arsenm.dev/Arsen6331/nomad.

Due to using SBCs, I am able to do all of this with a power consumption of just 50W.

Here is a list of things I host and what they're meant to replace:

• Matrix Dendrite: Discord
• Nextcloud: Google Drive
• OnlyOffice: Google Docs
• Home Assistant: HomeKit/SmartThings/<insert smart home platform here>
• Gitea: Github/Gitlab
• Minio: Amazon S3 (storage and download for files)
• LMS: Spotify
• SearXNG: Google Search (Note: I used to use my own metasearch engine but switched to SearXNG a couple days ago because mine kept getting ratelimited)

There are more but they're not really alternatives to anything, I'll list them here:

• Authelia: Provides authentication and 2fa for services that don't provide their own mechanism. Can also work similarly to "Sign in with Google" buttons via OAuth2 and OIDC.
• Traefik: Reverse proxy that provides access to all the rest
• Homer: Provides a dashboard for all my services. My instance can be found at: https://dashboard.arsenm.dev

Since most people don't have the resources or knowledge to host their own servers, this post will provide recommendations for increasing digital privacy without self-hosting. If anyone can think of something to add, please comment and I will edit the post.

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Alternatives to big tech services

This section will list alternatives to common big tech software that steals your data.

• Discord: Matrix; Easy to use clients: Nheko, Element
• Github: Codeberg
• Twitter: Mastodon
• YouTube: LBRY; Easy to use clients: LBRY Desktop, Odysee
• Google Search: SearX/SearXNG; List of public instances: https://searx.space/
• Windows: Any Linux distribution. Seriously, don't use Windows. Linux isn't as hard as people say it is. My parents and grandparents use it.
• Google Chrome: Firefox. Do not use Chrome, it is one of the worst things that exists for privacy. Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) is a little better but I still wouldn't use it.

Suggestions for privacy-respecting hardware

• Smartphone: PinePhone/PinePhone Pro
• Smartwatch: PineTime (definitely not biased at all)
• Laptop: Pinebook Pro, System76, Purism

Suggestions for privacy-respecting software

• TOR: Encrypts your traffic in three layers, then routes across a randomized network of nodes, providing very high security and privacy, and making it near impossible to track your activities.
• Mullvad VPN: VPN that allows you to make an account without providing any details, and pay in cash or crypto (or just with a card) to ensure your identity cannot be found out since it's not even known by Mullvad.
• LibreWolf: Browser focused on privacy and security. May break some sites, especially streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. Broken sites can be fixed by changing settings at the expense of some privacy if required.