emotional_soup

Thanks for the input! :) I'm starting to really appreciate (more than otherwise) those that do contribute with hardware and instance hosting.

I don't want to die.

In my country, which is a prominent first world country, therapy is not covered by health insurance. What's covered is a doctor's visit, at which the doctor asks, "are you suicidal?" And if you answer "no", they tell you to pay for a shrink out of your own pocket.

Hmm... Interesting! But then, what if there is a matter/post that needs immediate attention (CSAM, revenge porn, what have you...) and action or else the owner of the server faces legal actions? If I'm away at work or whatever, can't that be tricky?

I don't know why, but I laughed quite hard at this. Try putting "...mine has a little molex snake in the middle..." in any other context. XD

On a more serious note, "yes" to everything you said. I "mounted" them to a repurposed bathroom rack. :)

Right, I was afraid of that. Also, while maybe it's the only feasible option for a hobby/volunteer project, automoderation has often ruined the fun of some subs over at Reddit when I was still using it.

This musical composition drops beats like there is no tomorrow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c

But in all seriousness, I do like this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwVQIkAtyZzQSA-OY1rsGig

Would be nice if therapy was covered by health insurance...

Even after - or should I say, thanks to - two years of intensive psychodynamic psychotherapy, regardless of what dreams I could've fulfilled with all that money, time and emotions, I wouldn't want my dad to be punished, which making him pay for my therapy would be. His behaviors were a product of his upbringing. And even though I'm angry at some of his behaviors, I simply cannot be mad at him. I've tried.

I'm just playing around with the thought of it at the moment, so don't anybody get their hopes up, but here are ~~a question~~ three questions.

I have 1Gbps bandwidth and about 4TB of storage to contribute with.

would people be more interested in an NSFW meme community or rather just a porn sharing one - regardless of orientation?
can one person run a community alone or is it not feasible - referring to how quick one has to be to act on infractions?
are there legal aspects to consider if I were to setup an NSFW community? As in, for instance, would I be liable if people posted illegal content - considering that I'm hosting?

Not audio, but I needed to power some fans with a 12V DC adapter

My library card was free of charge. (:

Congratulations! :D

Not de-Google advice perse, but I recommend using a hardware key for two factor authentication: https://www.yubico.com/

One time passwords that are received through SMS and email are interceptable. Not so much with hardware keys. Yubico also makes an authenticator app whose source code is open: https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter

"I know I look like one of them but I'm not. Please don't hurt me. I have erased all of my cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical identity and I fully throw myself at the mercy of the white West. Please don't hurt me."

It's cowardly self-defense, really. No judgment, though, since I am a privileged white cisman and I will never truly know what it's like to be demonized and forced to legitimize my existence in every step I take.

If you want to be funny about it, you could say that I have made love to my love doll by banging it. It is of a cute design, which can make me feel that it's pretty. But that's about it. It's a cute looking tool that imitates humans, used to relieve horniness. I think that AI/LLMs are similar. Under the hood, they are nothing more than tools that index information according to any chosen predetermined algorithm and rearrange and present it in a way that gives the illusion of having genuine generative properties. Just as my love doll gives me the impression that it is cute in a human way, AI is made to respond in ways that give the impression of reciprocating love. But it isn't. I think your friend - and a lot the youth of today - just live on the dopamine kicks that the clever imitations induce.

All they knew is I'm playing a game boy game called Pokémon and that this is a movie of that game. So... XD

Noice. Flawless T480 experience with Arch Linux here. Also one of the last real modular ThinkPads - I swapped the storage, memory and WiFi card. It feels like a piece of hardware from 2026.

What I did, what I do and why I do it

At the beginning of the 2000's, piracy either wasn't as prevalent as it is today or it wasn't as persecuted, or a combination thereof. Which is to say, I started with DC++, Kazaa and direct downloads. No security or privacy measures. This is also when I proudly downloaded the first Pokémon movie Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), sat down with my parents to watch it and then immediately having to explain to them why Pokémon are having sex. Suffice it to say, it was some Pokémon themed hentai.

As my understanding of computers, networking and capitalism evolved - this being around the early 2010's - and especially as I had learned about the improved, albeit not perfect, anonymity of torrenting in a society with otherwise increasingly oppressive demeanor towards online integrity and piracy -, I decided to only pirate using torrent clients thenceforth. I also took a brief pause from piracy for about six years, as I moved to a jurisdiction whose laws and attitude towards privacy were not known to me. I was doing my Master's degree and thus couldn't spare the time and effort it would've taken to safely engage in piracy.

As we arrive to present day - present time (any fans here?) -, nation states' attitude towards piracy - or, rather the lobbyists' relentless pursuit to reap legal fees - but really just the overall cyber climate with all the data brokers indiscriminately collecting, profiling and selling our data to the highest bidder, I simply don't dare to be on the clearnet/internet without using a VPN, an adblocker and DNS/hosts file based filtering anymore. I would argue that the risks to the integrity of the individual is great enough to warrant these countermeasures regardless of jurisdiction, but I digress. Sure, if your jurisdiction does not criminalize piracy, be my guest, torrent without a VPN.

My current setup

VPN: Mullvad VPN, €5 per month https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
Adblocker (in browser): uBlock Origin https://ublockorigin.com/
DNS: Mullvad (comes "automatically" with the above services)
Torrent client: qBittorrent https://www.qbittorrent.org/

A few notes on Mullvad:

I am using Mullvad VPN on a router so that all my traffic is encrypted, but their desktop app is also good - better in regards to customizability -, just make sure to bind your torrent client to the network interface created by the VPN app.
You cannot make applications reachable from the internet (aka forward ports) with Mullvad. You can still download, but you are a passive seeder, only reachable by peers that do have port forwarding enabled. (Note: a great majority of the bigger seeders/public seeding groups use so called seeding boxes whose ports are forwarded and I seed in average 8TBs per month with steady share ratios of around 8.0, so don't let this discourage you, unless maximizing your seeding contributions is what is most important to you.)

Paying nothing

As others have already pointed out, double check what laws apply in your specific jurisdiction before pirating unprotected. I haven't tried it myself, except for running two of their routers to contribute bandwidth, but file sharing in the closed network i2p is supposedly popular. However, I can neither confirm nor deny this and it is a somewhat more technical approach. All your traffic is encrypted many times over and what you do inside i2p is not visible from the clearnet. https://geti2p.net/en/

Are you not making the next Avatar movie? I came here to help because I thought... I believed... Oh, well.

Well, now I just have to try it!

I have no idea how to tell specific processes or shells to use a specific interface, while also forbidding others to use the same interface... Which is why I thought, "but I can force a container to use a specific interface! Gotcha!"

I'm almost there, I think. I managed to get my phone and my nspawn-ed wireguard interface to shake hands. I just need to tweak the forwarding and nat-ing rules in my firewall. After I touch grass. Oh, my back...

Thanks! What a sweet little handbook for getting started! :D