Have a look at YUNOhost for your OS. It’s based on Debian and is designed to be really easy to set up and use, which might be useful for you as you have young children and not much time.

Going organic and plant-based would be such a massive improvement.

People have been saying this for at least 40 years.

Where did the Linux socks thing come from? I see it around and am curious about the lore.

This is dadjokes fine sir

Boooooo

I use Jami and Session. Interested to check out SimpleX Chat though.

Check out Cherrytree. I use it for keeping track of literally everything in my life. It’s hierarchical and searchable and you can insert files as well as hyperlink to external files, URLS and other nodes internally. You can export the database in various formats and there is also the option to have it encrypted. You can theme it in the preferences to make it look nicer too (the default is a bit retro-looking). It’s free and open source and AFAIK you can open your database in other applications, so you’re not locked into it.

If you want to sync it across devices just use Syncthing or whatever file sync app you’re selfhosting.

I highly recommend it! Probably the most important application I have on my computer.

Fennec

Who is the Payment Service Provider?

I can’t tell if this is decentralised.

I’ve had success using Czkawka (hiccup) for deduplicating

VPNs hide your IP from your ISP and anyone they share that information with. Here in the UK ISPs keep a record of every internet connection you make and pass it on to the government and perhaps others. Using a VPN here means that instead of them knowing every single website you visit they just know you are using a VPN (or Tor, or a proxy etc if that’s what you’re using). All they can tell from that data is what time you’re active online and how much data you upload/download, not which websites you’re visiting.

The websites that you connect to at the other end can still determine who you are by means other than your IP address, like information that your machine presents to them which is unique. VPNs don’t protect against this.

A VPN is like a private courier. What the recipient does with the delivered message (and what you’ve put in it) is out of the courier’s hands.

Just the fact that NordVPN claims to protect your privacy means that the average person hears about privacy a lot

Why couldn’t that bird get a sleeping bag like the hamster did? Seems a bit drastic taping it down by the neck

I sometimes wonder if NordVPN has done more for the privacy cause than anything else, purely for the sheer amount of advertising.

Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.

I’m currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I’ve had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.

I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.

YUNOhost is designed for this. You can do almost everything graphically via the webadmin. Mine has been running for a couple of years and I’m very happy with it. I have email, XMPP (both of which were installed out of the box), a website, file sharing and a few other things. There are a tonne of apps available, including Fediverse instances, Nextcloud. It’s a very cool thing to have available for making self-hosting more accessible.

That looks cool - thanks for the link :)

That sounds cool 👍 If you do decide to make it FOSS I’d be happy to try it out and give feedback.

Yeah but monkeys have hands on their feet, so they can pull on the pedal’s upstroke as well as push on the downstroke ☝️

There’s something about bird memes that puts them in a class of their own.