Today I was about to post on here about basically the same thing, and, well, I don’t know, I guess I want to talk or at least write it out. I’ve been blanket blocking politics and news ever since Trump got elected - as black and white as it gets. If a sub I see says “Trump”, it is blocked, and that is also applied everywhere else, including people I used to interact with. I completely left TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and mostly left Reddit, because I thought it would make me feel better. Between here and Reddit my blocklist probably has multiple hundreds of places that do nothing but wallow in misery or post about how everything sucks. Long story short I’m way less on social media now.

Anyway, it didn’t make it better. I’m still on here, occasionally, and now I’m finding that I also fucking hate it; everyone sounds miserable, no one is kind to themselves, there is a lot of hostility in general in relation to a bunch of severely inconsequential stuff—like serious heated arguments about which flavour of sponsored diarrhoea is less disgusting when consumed—I’ve even started noticing it in myself hanging out here. What I realised is that all the platforms I’ve left, I did so because they went to shit and lost any semblance of what I liked them for. It would’ve been fine if it was one facet, but it’s fucking everything, everywhere, and all at once, IRL and online.

Everything is invented, perfected, sometimes repeated and remembered, gentrified, commodified, sold for a profit, repackaged, dropshipped, consumed, regurgitated, optimised, dopamine fracked (shameless self promotion), ran through ChatGPT, summarised by Claude, and then I get to interact with it - maybe. If I subscribe for $9.99/wk. Just… so many things have become like that, it’s insufferable to ingest and even harder to create, because you have to meet that standard if you want the herd to see you, and for me creating for no audience at all is no fun, and empty proclamations of “just create!” help very little.

I have about a billion different hobbies (ADHD) and they don’t help or pay off at all, maybe just to distract myself and burn time faster, but there’s no enjoyment anymore. Everything kind of sucks there too.

And taking myself away from screens only serves to make me feel even worse - here a lot of my friends and a lot of my hobbies live one way or another; that’s why I used to love computers. Out there, people hate me for being gay, I have to mask constantly, and I faint from the summer heat. And now I can’t even love computers in peace at home, because even they have been mercilessly slopped by our sacreligious overlords.

I don’t feel depressed - I have a great job, friends, money, stuff, hobbies, social norms say I’m not really supposed to be depressed with all of that anyway. But I’m really struggling to actively enjoy anything anymore, and I’m honestly beginning to think it’s not me but everything else lol, as egotistical as that is. Except it’s not just me, it’s very prevalent - everyone knows everything sucks, and that’s another reason everything keeps sucking even harder. Oh well. I enjoyed writing this, a little, for a moment.

Sorry for rambling.

I ‘found’ the community so long ago I don’t quite remember if it was a strangely good fan comic about cartoons I watched, a general interest in “hey what do these animal people do on the internet”, or porn. It was definitely online, though. Either way, I simply decided I was going to be part of it at one point after learning about it, and that was that. I always appreciated the art of animation in all its forms, and it just so happens that a lot of animated things are anthropomorphic animals, so that could also be why I was initially interested in exploring it. As with all things in life, it just happened, I didn’t wake up one day with a total understanding of wanting to be a furry, it was gradual and took months or close to a year to fully embrace it and learn self-expression.

I consider ‘being a furry’ to be a general positive interest in anthropomorphised animals, but with some special sauce that’s very hard to explain. In my head, there’s a subtle difference between working for Disney being the character designer for Nick Wilde, and being a furry. It can be a hobby, it can be a kink, a profession, an outlet, a mask, a way to socialise, can be all of that at once and more, or just one of those things. There is no solid definition. A lot would agree that “interest” covers it as an umbrella definition - and that interest goes in various directions and to various degrees.

I personally like a lot of things to do with the characters/fursonas - character design, character art, how expressive they are, and how much soul and raw human creativity OCs have in relation to their creators. I appreciate art, expression and self-expression, and with furries those things are ubiquitous and highly visible once you’re in and go beyond the sex pest surface that ‘normies’ see or the top-100 score on e926.

I’m not the social kind, at all, and that gnawed at me for a while. I found refuge in being part of the community, even if I am practically silent.

The community has a ridiculously high number of really cool people in it that I seriously enjoy talking to, keeping up with and sharing a lot of interests with. Don’t confuse this with me saying it’s perfect - as with all social gatherings, there are truly evil and weird people, but everyone has been good to me.

I like how welcoming it is and how open and friendly everyone is to newcomers. I also like how shamelessly weird you can be as part of it - no one really judges absolutely degenerate “I’m the only person with this” kinks or very niche and weird interests. And while now this applies to more corners of society, and internet in particular, than it did 10 or 20 years ago, and there are wholesome communities out there, it’s still rare. The furry community has always held itself to a higher standard of acceptance, being the constant victim of abuse and trolling and the eternal lulcow, it kind of had no choice. I related to that part too and wished to be that resilient. And even today as more and more places get invaded with astroturfing, politics, self-pity, bots, trolls, AI slop, and generally evil people, it remains a good refuge for me.

There’s something inherently special I feel that I can’t quite quantify in various such niche-but-numerous communities, I feel the same about certain TV fandoms or more obscure memes or tiny invisible-to-the-public trends. Big communities and even society at large have never been particularly kind or accepting to me, being a furry helped me understand that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why wouldn’t you? It’s a free way to write down your struggles and get a response without judgment, all without the insurmountable effort and bravery threshold of getting to a therapist, not to mention the cost.

That it’s sycophantic and actually harmful to vulnerable people is beside the point for them, same as lung cancer is beside the point for a smoker, until they get it.

This is a complete failure of the healthcare system. We’ve normalised seeking help, but we failed to make it available. What to speak of the countries where mental healthcare is still stigmatised, it’s probably even higher there. It’s a sad number because the system failed these people, not their friends or family for “not being there enough”

• Domain I bought like 4 years ago for 20€, I think it’s 13€/yr
• A shitty VPN with port forwarding because I trust my ISP way less than I do the VPN, 36€/yr
• iCloud+ Mail - it’s 1€/mo and gets past all spam filters, has catch-all and doesn’t get in my way much
• ~0.05€/mo for network egress on a “free” GCP VM instance
• 0€/mo for my main server (Oracle can get fucked though, reprehensible evil company!)

That’s it for the recurring costs related in any way to my homelab.

Instead of nginx, you can try Caddy, which is way easier to get started with and rolls HTTPS for you - no actions needed. Nginx is very powerful, but also very “programmer-brained” and at times really confusing. Strictly speaking with Caddy all you’ll need is installing it, opening ports, editing its config to point at a local IP or directory, and you’re done.

https://caddyserver.com/Read the docs there as well, they are good and understandable. Follow the Caddyfile steps, not JSON.

Sorry if I came off that way. About misunderstanding the point - look at the other comments. People are making the same points as me. I don’t think I have misunderstood anything here, and I don’t think being a long response automatically makes it any less valid to understand how nuanced and all encompassing our dependence on third parties is.

You’re the one saying “this is a Wendy’s” which feels quite condescending in a post explicitly asking for opinions on how where Plex falls in the selfhosting community, including as defined in the sidebar.

Please don’t try to gatekeep software or turn selfhosting into a Professional Redditor Larper shitwar like iOS vs Android. Literally no one needs or wants that.

You can criticise Plex for its many shortcomings, that’s valid. Even better if you contribute to Jellyfin so it can overcome its shortcomings. But saying Plex is not self-hosted for puritan reasons is not a good look and smells like StackOverflow and elitist neckbeards; you’re disqualifying people from the community just because you, in your infinite pedantic wisdom, cannot comprehend that they also have valid reasons for using what they use.

By this logic:

• If you use the internet, nothing you access through it is self-hosted, because your ISP dictates if it’s allowed or not. Tailscale, WireGuard, OpenVPN, or a direct port connection are all subject to this. However you can access Jellyfin remotely is subject to this.
• Docker isn’t self-hosted - you depend on Docker Inc, their image registry will be aware of some details about your host, including your IP, which is technically PII and is directly linked to you.
• Let’s Encrypt certificates aren’t self-hosted because they’re an external CA and collect data like your email.
• Jellyfin is not self-hosted, it depends on TMDB and OMDB which are commercial or external.
• Pi-hole is not self-hosted as it depends in many cases on GitHub or external resources for its block lists, and it depends on public resolvers to operate.
• Ubuntu is not self-hosted because Canonical controls everything and has telemetry
• Neither is Windows, Mac, Debian, Arch, or even FreeBSD - they control updates and packages and if they randomly become evil, they have levers on you no matter what. Maybe TempleOS lol.
• Nextcloud is not self-hosted because they control the add-on store, update servers and has telemetry.
• The BitTorrent protocol isn’t self hosted because you rely on trackers and they collect telemetry about your client
• Media piracy isn’t self-hosted because you’re relying on other people to produce it for you
• If you get phone notifications, emails, messages, or whatever else - those aren’t self hosted. Even if you host Ntfy you’re still relying on Apple or Google notification relay servers.

I could go on.

By any stretch of this line of thinking, even the mere act of downloading any software in the first place disqualifies it from counting as self-hosted, because you didn’t build it from scratch and you depend on an external resource, your ISP, a DNS resolver, your operating system, your hardware (microcode, BIOS), your browser, and so on and so forth. The logic breaks down very fast. Don’t.

I subscribed briefly, then requested a refund. The reason was both for the highly customisable and curated search, but also for Assistant - because I trust Kagi a little more than Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, or Perplexity with my “best pancake batter according to Reddit” queries - even if that’s fundamentally compromising my privacy. Kagi tended to deliver better information in general, so maybe I’d want to use LMs less frequently - I thought.

However, that slight hint of trust was shattered very quickly when they did what every company with a profit does best - sold me a lie:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/10116-kagi-assistant-standalone-subscription

Which means what I’d subscribed to will have eventually gotten worse, likely for the same price, and Kagi had no intention of letting me know before I subscribed, and their intention seemed to be to just make active subscriptions worse, as they were opposed to grandfathering in the thread.

So I decided I’ll pass, I have enough “products” I don’t trust. Even if it’s all in the “we’re ‘contemplating’ stage”, it’s clear what their approach is and how far they’re willing to go with, pardon me, fucking users over.

P.S. I understand the sustainability problem. But I’d have expected them to have that part figured out before actively offering it in a subscription. The way they are going about it is off-putting. So, no thanks.

For my friends and family, it’d be fairly annoying to connect to Tailscale, and really annoying to connect to Wireguard or Yggdrasil.

Think of a smart TV used by your mom and having to guide her to install Wireguard on it lol.

I don’t fundamentally distrust Plex’s encryption after having tcpdumped it and seeing nothing but gibberish - which is exactly what my ISPs would see, that’s my reason for encryption. But I do not trust them to keep that feature operational indefinitely.

I’ve actually seen more people commercialise Jellyfin because you can edit the fuck out of its source code and add 10 ads and 3 paywalls. I’ve only seen people selling access to Plex shares directly - like you would sell a Steam key, whereas Jellyfin custom shares get customised and sold as a Netflix alternative with an active subscription in some places around the world.