IDK where I’ve read that… should have double checked before posting, my bad.

Quick fact checking:

US police kills some 1,281 people last year (wikipedia).

1,281/340,110,988*100,000 gives around 0.38 police killings/100,000 people, which is below homicide rate in EU.

I couldn’t (be bothered to) find out what the overall European homicide rate actually is (it also depends on what you count as “Europe”), but Germany is at around 0.8, France at 1.8, Italy at 0.57, Spain at 0.9 and Poland at 0.8 (these are the five most populous countries). So… let’s guesstimate it at around 1? (numbers are from this random source).

We can conclude that US policemen are roughly 38% as deadly as European criminals (if it wasn’t clear, this last statement is a joke)

TLDR: Protesting or resisting privately inside your house does not lead to social change and is not the most rational way of protecting yourself if you feel threatened by your government.

Self-hosting is not “resistance”: at most, it’s prepping for nerds, with computers instead of guns.

Self-hosting is not even a rational/efficient way of making a statement. If that’s what you want, it’s far more efficient to follow the established tradition of declaring you are moving to Canada and not following up with actual actions.

Don’t get me wrong: I can relate to the nerdy way of coping with the ugliness around us (I say “us”, but thankfully I don’t live in the US), but - the way I see it - it’s that your society that needs change, and self hosting won’t help with that.

Frankly, the shit you US people are putting up with is unreal.

It has always been (US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe - read that again and pause a second to think about it this isn’t true - see comments below), and it’s just getting worse.

If you feel threatened you can essentially respond by fighting, fleeing, or cowering.

If you wanna FIGHT (this is what “resistance” is about), try to use whatever power you have and apply your energies to bring actual change. If you don’t feel comfortable acting outdoors, this could include lending your nerd skills to protesters or (nonviolent) resistance groups. Heck, even being a keyboard warrior is more useful to changing society than being a hobbyist sysadmin.

If you wanna FLEE, just leave the country. Honestly, there are better places to live than the US, and (if you have or plan to have any) better places to raise your children.

If you wanna COWER, then be a prepper or a self-hoster or whatever, but be aware that, while misrepresenting your reaction as “resistance” may make you feel more heroic than you are, spreading the misrepresentation can also lead others to cower instead of fighting. Is that what you want?

By that reasoning, backup isn’t redundancy because you’ll lose your data if the backup gets corrupted while restoring.

That said, there’s nothing wrong in redefining “redundant” to mean “having two or more duplicates”… you should however tell people if you do, to avoid misleading people that assume the dictionary definition.

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RAID (except RAID0) is data redundancy, it just isn’t backup (ie. it doesn’t help if you accidentally delete stuff, or if some bug corrupts it, or if you drop the computer while moving it).

is there an easier way to do self-signed certs besides spinning up your own certificate authority?

Letsencrypt works fine, just use a “real” domain and DNS challenge.

Your service will need to be on the “real” domain, but it won’t need to be accessible externally and you won’t need a public DNS entry for it (of course your VPS will still need to be able to resolve the backend’s name).

In layman’s speech (my speech) raid 1 and mirroring are essentially the same thing.

Technically, IIUC RAID is only used for hardware raid controllers, ZFS calls their equivalent RAIDZ1 (and I think it stores data in one disk and parity in another?) and both LVM and btrfs call theirs mirroring (each with its nuances). Whichever you pick, it’s a mode where you use two disks at 50% efficiency and your data survives the loss of one disk.

There are configurations that use more disks with higher efficiency than 50%, but I would avoid them in a homelab because the more disks you have, the higher the power drain and the higher the chance that at least one of them will fail. In a homelab scenario what you really want to minimize is the chance of needing to perform maintenance (replacing a drive in a RAID and restoring from a backup are both a hassle, and it’s not like the first requires significantly less work).

In your shoes (and in mine, whenever I’ll need to redo my RAID1 NAS), I’d skip RAID altogether and use the extra disk for extra backups of the data I care about.

Most of my NAS is filled with movies I’ve ripped, and I honestly wouldn’t really care much if I were to lose them: the movies I may want to re-watch are really few and I can just rip them again (or even buy them again) if the need arises.

Backups are enormously more important than RAID (will RAID do anything for you if you accidentally delete your family photos? what if the NAS floods or gets dropped on the floor?): you should really direct your time/resources/effort towards setting up automatic and monitored backups before worrying about RAID.

A NAS is any computer with space/connectors for drives and an ethernet port… it doesn’t need to be powerful or state-of-the-art, and there’s really no reason it should be expensive (besides the drives).

Of course companies will be more than happy to sell you an outdated J4125-based computer with 4 disk bays for over 500EUR, but that doesn’t mean you have to bite.

As for RAID, if you want to use it, just setup mirrored drives (ZFS, BTRFS or even LVM) and be done with it: you’ll need backups anyway so don’t overthink it. Unless you want to avoid downtime (which isn’t probably a big issue for most of your data?), you can do without RAID and just restore from backup if a drive happens to break.

If you don’t want to build your own PC, I’ve heard good things about these: https://aoostar.com/collections/nas-series (beware: I didn’t try any of them - my N3150-based NAS is not old enough to need replacement yet)

Leverage whatsapp and hang good old posters around the neighborhood?

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

https://selfh.st/apps/?alternative=IFTTT

Did you ask an AI to do the list for you? (no need to answer)

Intriguing.

What’s the mechanism for dealing with spammers?

In lemmy there’s a clear escalation path that will lead to either the spammer’s instance dealing with the issue or the instance itself being de-federated.

How would that work in a p2p system?

Each user having to individually block every spammer will work as well as it did for email back in the day.

Look at restic and/or borg first. Iff you have specific needs that they don’t address, then look at other things (including reviewing your requirements: chances are you are doing something wrong in that case).