Having a disc does not mean it will work offline, unfortunately. These retailers just want to be able to resell used copies so they can make extra money.

Don't catch you trippin up!

In the current job market, you know it was the other way round.

Well, the isolation allows you select what's appropriate for each bit of data.

For example, my financial data have to live elsewhere - namely the financial institutions I use. I've been paying Todoist $36/year for the past 12 years and they have zero pressure to enshittify, so I'm okay keeping that data elsewhere. I also outsource my email to Fastmail because it's generally inadvisable to self-host email.

However, for most things that I've started using recently (karakeep, miniflux, baby-buddy, homebox, ghostfolio, and so many others), I've chosen open source apps and run their servers on my homelab. Linux on the server (unlike the desktop) is extremely well funded. There are a ton of different types of container and micro-vm configurations you can mix and match to give the exact level of isolation, resource, filesystem, and network access you're comfortable with.

Also, I don't think it makes much sense to use proprietary software for much in the future. The cost of software development has been going down at increasing rate for as long as I can remember for a variety of reasons, and LLM-assisted AI Agents is the just the latest iteration. With the latest SOTA models, it doesn't take much to create an maintain a selfhosted OSS app - someone with the will to put in time and the most basic understanding of the basic fundamentals of software engineering.

Certainly not things I would trust particularly personal or sensitive data with. But remember that breaking out of server-side containers/micro-vms is really hard, and way beyond the capabilities of any AI slop.

So yeah, from what I've seen so far the best tools out there for enjoying the largest variety of software (including potentially undisclosed AI slop) safely is server-side Linux containers + client-side browser isolation. The closest thing we have to sandboxes in the desktop is flatpak, and it's so trivial to break out that I've watched people do it unintentionally, just trying to make their app work in it.

So, all posts are from the perspective of people that are really into music. Enthusiasts that care deeply about individual albums and artists.

Whereas streaming services are most likely designed to cater to casual listeners like me. I can't remember the last time I listened to an entire album. I haven't liked any individual artist enough to attend a live concert. I generally listen to music while I'm doing stuff as background noise.

I used to listen to the radio for that. But streaming services algorithms were a strict upgrade to that due to lack of ads and talk show hosts.

Honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to determine whether a given piece of music is AI generated or not by listening to it.

So I don't think direct purchase of digital LPs could ever be viable for people like me. And I'm guessing (based on the success of streaming services) that there are a lot more people like me than there are enthusiasts. Yes, I can switch to the least bad streaming service according to Lemmy, out of solidarity (and no other reason). Remember 99% of people won't do that.

Just adding a perspective that might be missing from this community

In the US

FTFY. The long term outcome for this is that the world stops revolving around the US. For better or for worse

That said though, the sundress looks pretty breezy and comfy too

I'm pleasantly surprised that it takes two did so well. I hope it shows publishers that there's a market for couch co-op!

You might be misunderstanding the value-add of a CDN to self-hosting, so here's my attempt at explaining:

I've been self-hosting things for a very long time. In the old days, we would wrangle our routers to expose port 80 for HTTP (and later, port 443 for HTTPS) and forward those connections to the self-host server and then add the appropriate DNS records to point our website domain to our home IP address (which was its own fun challenge when ISPs refused to give static IP addresses for home plans). Relatively simple.

However, in recent years (especially after the pandemic) the internet has become a much more hostile place. People find vulnerabilities in your nginx/caddy/apache or whatever reverse proxy you use (or router, or any one of the many other parts of your network/software stack) gain access to your local network and your personal data. And then there are bad actors doing DDoS attacks or AI crawlers generating DDoS levels of incoming requests to overload your hardware.

All that combined means it's very dangerous to have your home IP exposed to the internet (allowing any sort of inbound requests) at all.

So, how do we access our self-hosted stuff while we're outside of home? The safest approach is to use a VPN. Tailscale is the most popular one that I've come across. Only client devices that are connected to the VPN have access to your stuff. Random bad actors can't poke your self-hosted stack for vulnerabilities.

Okay, what if you want to share something with people publicly? I for one, use Immich for my photo libraries and it's very easy to be able to share a link to an album for friends and extended family to access without having to install and configure a VPN on their phones.

That is where cloudflare comes in. We can run cloudflared on our machine, which makes an outbound request to cloudflare and creates a tunnel to route all the incoming requests from their servers to your reverse proxy. Your network is still not exposed to the internet, and the edge nodes (the machines that actually front the incoming traffic from the clients) are not owned by you.

Now, I guess it's feasible to rent a VPS on DigitalOcean/OVH/Azure/AWS and run a Tailscale exit node there to achieve a similar result. I haven't looked too deeply into Pangolin but it looks kind of similar. Now you're adding extra work to keep those configured correctly (and up-to-date), is less secure because you're not doing that full time (unlike the engineers at cloudflare) and you're still dependent on that VPS provider to not go down, so the disaster recovery profile hasn't changed all that much.

That's why there's no self-hosted alternatives to a CDN. I guess you can go with their competitors like Fastly/Akamai/etc, but all of them are considerably more expensive. And even the ones that do have free tiers have data limits or bill per gigabyte. That's an extra headache to worry about for that one month your mother decides to take 1000 videos of your son during the family vacation and her phone automatically backed up all of them at full-quality.

Honestly, these days I use fdroid as my primary app store. It's been an amazing way to cut through the junk and find great apps.

Woah...an actually heartwarming story that wasn't just a forced positive spin on people coping with the orphan crushing machine!

Color me surprised 🙀