Signal and Telegram both offer comparable functionality without mandatory recurring fees

Telegram introduced a subscription named Telegram Premium a few years ago. You get similar functionality there – setting colors to your profile or groups that you’re part of, custom emojis (including animated ones), custom stickers, an indicator that you’re on Premium, custom profile statuses, increased limits for sending files, etc. There’s a lot more, I just listed some off the top of my head. They’ve been pushing people into Premium. Telegram is perfectly usable without that, of course. My favorite Premium feature is that you can require unknown senders to pay a fee to be able to send you a message :D Meanwhile, non-Premium users can get spammed normally.

Thanks!

May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.

If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts

That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.

A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).

I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.

If you’re that paranoid you can host it yourself.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs?tab=readme-ov-file

https://mozilla-services.github.io/syncstorage-rs/

It’s open source.

Voyager is free.

I meant that I can buy one of those Radeons dedicated to AI work, like the ASRock Radeon AI PRO R9700 Creator 32GB GDDR6. If I need to.

Currently my Ryzen iGPU is all I need, because all I need is to see the graphical desktop environment on my screen ;) It does the job well.

I use Claude Code as well and I am slightly concerned with that ID verification news, even more so because of the technology partner that they chose.

Say I have a GPU with 32GB VRAM and I am on Linux, what local LLM would be good for coding?

Currently I just have an iGPU ;) but that’s always an option, albeit a very expensive one.

Thanks for the extensive explanation. I was almost certain you were joking about using Git for that purpose but it seems you are being serious :)

I will stick to my Restic backups for now. :)

Being a Linux newbie that idea did not even cross my mind. MIND BLOWN. In all seriousness, though, are there ever user secrets in ~/.config? It seems like a crazy & genius idea at the same time.

(I keep them in two Restic backups)

For shopping lists I use Listonic. It’s easy to use and better suited for shopping because it groups products into categories, so you don’t have to sort them yourself and don’t have to walk around the store back and forth because you picked up strawberries, moved to the toilet paper section and diary and then noticed you didn’t pick apples. :) It syncs, so if you go shopping with somebody else, you can split and see what the other person already grabbed (as long as there’s connectivity, of course).

Oh, I guess I never ran into that problem myself. I do use Joplin on my PC and on my Android phone. Thanks for the info.

That’s fair. I myself migrated from Google Keep to Standard Notes and later to Joplin. I never thought that I needed for it to look like post-its :) But now that you said that I see why you wouldn’t be happy with either of the non-alternatives.

As for passwords, well, I wont talk about that. It’s not good but still not worst practices at least.

Paper notebook? ;)

I just wish syncing was a bit more seemless.

What problem do you have? I use OneDrive sync, which is not even recommended, because OneDrive doesn’t work well with syncing many tiny files, but it works surprisingly good. If I need to sync NOW (rarely), there’s a menu item for that. Otherwise the automated sync was good for me.

My Bitwarden and Proton Pass also require Yubikey to be present when logging in on a new device.

It is not a problem if they are on different disks, though? I hope so :)