most of the fediverse is dedicated to mainstream “general interest” sharing and hobbyism requires a passion that usually doesn’t align with the mainstream.
the people who engage in hobbies share it fellow enthusiasts and they seek out niche places where it can be shared and, currently, the dominant niche interests on the fediverse are either technology, privacy, identity or politics. the mainstream doesn’t like any (especially the latter) so most ignore it at best or block it at worst and then complain that there’s no niche content.
it’s impressive to me too since it’s free: i used to use the vpn feature heavily when showing up to work in the office was still a thing for me.
i still use the ssh server with sshfs as a cloud-like storage for uploading things from my phone and work computers like pics and for downloading media like music and videos; although i’ve been gradually weaning myself off that via social media content so that now i barely use it at all besides as an ssh tunnel.
the add blocking alone makes the effort worth while for me and i’ve gotten so used to it that i can no longer tolerate adds when i have to to use other people’s rigs; it’s makes me strangely angry somehow. lol
i created this post about how i have it setup; but this time around i’m going to replace the windows vm behind the pfsense vm with a physical AP since that’s the part of the stack that’s the most proned to breaking. i’m not to enthused about doing so because i have a high gain antennae attached the internal wifi nic that i was using as an AP, so i got GREAT signal for really long distances and even into the underground parking lot of my apartment building and the beach nearby, but i rarely ever us it as such so it’s hard justifying the headache to myself.
At this point in history, it’s too late to implement identity protections. Your profile is already built, stored, and backed up. They even know your deleted edgelord MySpace account and that you unfriended Tom (you monster). I guess if you were born in a ditch without a SSN, and never signed up for anything, not even a house/apartment, you could go under the radar.
i was going to say something along these lines and also that the data they have on you has life long implications.
i used to work for a data broker and the tricks that their data scientists were able to cook up to track and predict people’s behavior was really unnerving to me.
the company’s clientele was mostly high end retail & real estate and geared towards predicting the likelihood of your next “lifetime milestone purchases” (that’s what they called it). i had access to the product; so i looked up its portfolio for me and it predicted that i was ever going to buy a house or car.
i chuckled at it back then because my salary as a software engineer at the time was a very comfortable 6 figures so it didn’t seem likely to me. 8 years later i’m scraping by working for a local non-profit, i’m still driving the same car and home ownership has never seemed further away.
cctv can be free if you’re use free open source software like motion or linux.
the phone i used was a redmi note 13 pro.
i had it on tmobile prepaid for a little bit over year or so and i had the account since 2009 w 2 other chinese phones in the past. i tried switching to at&t in january and it worked for the first day, but then i got a text from at&t saying that my phone is no longer compatible and i had no signal. the store told me that the imea number had to be whitelisted and that i had to put in a request at their website. the signal reception sucked anyways, so i tried switching back to my old t-mobile account by popping in the sim, but it didn’t work either and the t-mobile store said that chinese phones aren’t allowed on prepaid anymore for “public safety”. (he literally used air quote fingers and rolled his eyes. lol)
google recommended mvno’s to get around the ban, but they’re just as unaware as most that this is a thing in the united states; their websites still show that my redmi is compatible but i’ve literally tried them all and none have worked.
chatgpt recommended getting around the ban by purchasing phones that share the same hardware like they do with oneplus, oppo, etc. and that was the approach i was going to take until i decided to get a fairphone and put eos on it instead.
this project has always been made out of old or second hardware and this isn’t the first motherboard to die; but thanks for the well wishing anyways.