So, a bookmarks list basically.

Prediction: you’ll never actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.

ITT: lots of generic VPN advice by people who have no experience with the specific problem.

This is the only answer you need to read. It’s a non-problem if you just do this, and there’s no reason not to do it.

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Isn’t this like saying “What phone numbers do you have in your address book?”

Well that puts the loss of my little VPS into perspective.

And terrible, archaic, chaotic practices such as activating your 2FA without permission and then locking you out of your account for weeks pending multiple signed paper letters. Oh, and sometimes their datacenters burn down and take your server with them. I’m sad to have to throw them under the bus like this. I want OVH to succeed but personally my patience with them definitively ran out.

Absolutely fair.

Interested in the answer too! Of course, you could get the same result from a 5-buck VPS with zero maintenance and rock-solid reliability (my solution). But sure, 5 bucks is 5 bucks. And also, encryption is optional if it’s your own device.

You could even try next going to back cloud.

OK. Given that self-hosters are maintaining two PCs already, I suppose that’s fair.

As an RSS user since the early days, there’s something I never get: why is this something that people are hosting? Are you really all consuming so much news, so much of the time, that you need to do it simultaneously on two devices? That sounds like news overload to me but what do I know.

Personally, I catch up once a day for an hour (or two). Seem more than enough and means I only ever need an RSS client. Right now: the Feedbro add-on in Firefox desktop.

As for tips and tools, RSSBox is a useful one. IMO if RSS were more popular this is the sort of thing that would be built into the client.

The point still stands that no one outside of the US cares about their constitution or political system, and to say it does shows an incredible level of ignorance of world politics outside of US borders.

I’m not sure these sweeping statements are really helping your argument. Despite my “incredible level of ignorance” I am in fact not American myself, I have no particular reason to defend the USA for the sake of it, and I stick to my assertion that the stability of the US Constitution and the American social contract is unusual in world affairs - and even that this is not particularly controversial among historians and pol-sci specialists, notwithstanding your dismissiveness. Don’t agree? That’s fine, but maybe consider letting up on the contemptuous tone, it doesn’t really elevate the debate.

Very few countries in the world have had a political history as stable as the USA’s over the last couple of centuries. Take France, which since 1788 has had: an absolute monarchy, three revolutionary regimes, a constitutional monarchy, two imperial regimes, a bout of full-on fascism, and five separate republican constitutions. At most of the junctures between those things, there was suffering and bloodshed. Maybe people “don’t give a fuck about the US constitution” - it certainly looks like Americans don’t, these days - but the stability of American democratic politics is genuinely very unusual and the constitution obviously has something to do with that.

As for your take on populism in the world, I am not as nonchalant as you. Yes, the rot has been stopped in some places, for now (Brazil, Poland, partly India) but in general it is still very much on the march. India, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary (which is right inside the EU - and now Slovakia too), El Salvador, Mexico, Tunisia, etc. The Arab world is less democratic than ever. And of course China is once again going full dictatorship only a few decades after discovering what a bad idea that is with Mao. Personally I doubt that China is much influenced by US politics, but pretty much everyone else in the world is. And most of this happened quite neatly during the period following Trump’s first election. Whether it is mostly cause or correlation, the link is there.

Yes and that’s the sad paradox. America’s interest is now (at least temporarily) at odds with the interests of freedom and democracy. Trump’s abuses cannot be seen to pay.

The worst impact of this debacle will be outside the USA. This will be taken as a green light for strongman politics everywhere. Including here in Europe where that sort of thing has ended very badly in the past.

You Americans really have behaved like spoiled children. Whatever the leftist fringe here thinks, the American constitution is the envy of the world. You’re on the same electoral calendar since the 1780s, without a single interruption. For literally centuries your leaders would follow the rules, shake hands and leave office when their time was up. Over and over again. It’s an incredible achievement, it was the template for a successful democracy.

And then this ogre came along and broke it all, and you decadently voted him back in.

IMO America’s institutions will contain the damage, probably. But other countries will inevitably now follow the example of America’s voters. And for some of them that’s going to turn out less well.