th3raid0r

I think this take is starting to be a bit outdated. There have been numerous films to use Blender. The “biggest” recent one is RRR - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-indian-blockbuster-rrr/

Man in the High Castle is also another notable “professional” example - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/

It’s been slow, but Blender is starting to break into the larger industry. With bigger productions tending to come from non-U.S. producers.

There is something to be said about the tooling exclusivity in U.S. studios and backroom deals. But ultimately money talks and Autodesk only has so much money to secure those rights and studios only have so much money to spend on licensing.

I’ve been following blender since 2008 - what we have now is unimaginable in comparison to then. Real commercial viability has been reached (as a tool). What stands in the way now is a combination of entrenched interests and money. Intel shows how that’s a tenuous market position at best, and actively self destructive at worst.

Ultimately I think your claim that it’s not used by real studios is patently and proveably false. But I will concede that it’s still an uphill battle and moneyed interests are almost impossible to defeat. They typically need to defeat themselves first sorta like Intel did.

yeah…

They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.

Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.

I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.

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The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

As for your domain question:

1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.

I’ve tried it before, it’s fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.

kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I’ve used it.

He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you’re working on. Unfortunately I don’t really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking “Oh my god, that would save me SO much time”.

Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.

Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven’t bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days…

No kidding. One of the YouTubers I followed was really shilling Zed editor. He didn’t seem to mention that it was Mac only.

Well, I guess it’s back to neovim on kiTTY terminal for me.

Sometimes I swear Mac based developers think the world revolves around them.

Lucky! I wish I had symmetrical fiber with all the ports available.

I totally have a server capable of hosting a LOT of things but lack the upload to make use of it. I’m considering transferring to a rack mount and sending it to be colocated at a datacenter within driving distance.

You missed one:

ISP - Internet Service Provider

Eh, but then he won’t learn anything. I’ve never found that response acceptable. It just perpetuates the problem. To each their own though!

On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you’d likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it’s always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP’s business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you’ll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

Then there’s a security aspect. What happens if you’re site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you’re in for a world of hurt.

These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

As for the non-technical issues:

There’s also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it’s only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it’s easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content’s proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I’d rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I’d fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.

This article is ancient. We have more recent elections to go off of.

And according to basically everything I can find, “Moms For Liberty” and related groups suffered major losses basically everywhere the last cycle.

I’m not at all suggesting to not worry, after all, it’s worry that got us to ensure they didn’t win. But I am suggesting that your information is very out of date and that you should do a better job of finding recent points to support your claim.

Also, I think this is off topic for this community and seems far more like political bait as some have pointed out.