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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • As an introvert that likes the idea of hanging out with friends but gets exhausted from the thought of social interaction, I can’t stress enough how much I value friends that include me like this. I even usually have fun and will sometimes even join in after a while.

    PSA, always invite your introvert friends, and don’t take it personally if they decline.


  • To play devils advocate here, Protons costs are not fixed. The storage, compute, and people behind your email (and other services) continue to cost more today than they did when you signed up. I would also expect, as a business user, that your prices to customers have increased at some point to cover higher costs of supplies and needed overhead. It seems fair for Proton to do the same and I wouldn’t expect this to be how it always works (and in fact I’d expect at some point in the future you’ll get hit with a catchup increase, either because you’ll need to change your billing cycle or Proton just can’t continue to deliver the service for what you pay on your grandfathered rate). As long as rate increases are not egregious and are well communicated by companies I respect, I see them as an unfortunate but fair way to keep those companies in business.






  • Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.

    The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.




  • In general it’s because it’s difficult or impossible to fully monetize a user on a third party app. This could be because the API doesn’t serve ads (like Reddit) or because it’s harder to track and harvest user data when they are not using a first party app.

    Essentially, platforms like Reddit make deals with advertisers that they will display an ad in a certain format near certain types of connect (and away from other kinds) and will show them to users with specific interests. They can’t really do that if the user isn’t coming through a platform the company fully controls (so their website or apps). On top of this, their apps are designed to keep you engaged as long as possible and to harvest as much information about you as they can without you getting upset and leaving. This lets them target ads more specifically (which means they can charge more for them) as well as sell that data to brokers for even more money (who then sell it to advertisers). It’s all about how to best turn your attention into money, and a third party app doesn’t allow that (either at all or as much as a first party experience).

    Reddit specifically also wants to sell access to their data to companies like OpenAI to train large language models as additional revenue sources, to do that they need to lock down the API used by apps to work with the platform.