My biggest surprise was learning there are gay and Trans Republicans. Like, how does that even work? unless you are trying to demonstrate people what irony looks like, it is big brain time.

I host an instance of searxng and I am quite happy with it. It displays results of a combination of engines. If you want to spin up your own, I have a blog that explains how to do in basic steps : https://mustafacanyucel.com/blog/blog-13.html

Depends on your user count and post frequency. Images take a lot of space and space is still not cheap on cloud.

I ❤️ FairMail. It is so customizable and versatile, I even bought the pro version for support.

For news aggregation and summary, I totally agree with you. For just search indexing and referring, though, I think paying just for a link that is no more than 10 words is not justified. If I post a link in this comment from a Canadian news site, should I pay a fee, too? Because section 2 part b states that access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.

This law should apply to all search engines, should it not?

Thank you. It is only css and html, but since my creative skills are no better than a potato’s, I am using a designer-made template for css 😅.

I have a yearly vps subscription with 16GB ram, 160 GB ssd and 8 cores, including 5TB network limit. It is some Lithuanian company (time4vps). I don’t have a static ip at home, and if I want to get one I have to pay pretty much the same amount, so why bother?

It has Debian 11, and ufw as the only security measure, together with Caddy as reverse proxying everything so only a handful of ports are open (80,8080, 443, and one for syncthing and one for dot).

I have the following services running:

• Nextcloud (for office tools, calendar, to do, boards)
• firefly iii for self accounting
• technitium dns server for doh and dot with blocking
• grafana, prometheus and node exporter foe monitoring
• libreddit for, well, you know
• searcxng
• trilium for private knowledge base
• tailscale for tunneling and VPN
• syncthing for file syncing and password sync together with keepassxc
• my personal page, auto updating with github actions over sftp.

I have partially documented most of my work in my blog, so you can take a look if you wish https://mustafacanyucel.com/#blog .

I sugget using Caddy. It’s insanely easy, handles SSL so you don’t need Let’s Encrypt (it uses LE under the hood), has a reverse_proxy command that is 1-3 lines. I dabbled with Apache2 for a time, and I can say switching to Caddy was the best decision.

I now have a DNS server, syncthing, nextcloud, grafana and a few more stuff all behind reverse proxy, SSL handled by caddy. Some of them point to file servers for different paths (i.e. stuff.example.com/admin goes to a website and stuff.example.com goes to the service) and the configuration is less than 5 lines.

I tried with the official docker way, and failed too many times :) . Then I decided to lurk around some public instances and let the platform mature for a little bit more. The problem is usually the docker build fails.

I advise to run Caddy server instead of nginx or apache. It is insanely easier compared to the other two, handles SSL out-of-the-box without any input, and very user-friendly.