I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox (and Thunderbird) since Phoenix 0.5 in 2002. Before that I still using Netscape Navigator 4.x It was breadth of fresh air. I even contributed bug reports and helped manage one of third party theme forums back then. Have occasionally donated to them throughout the last 20 years.

It’s sad how they’ve basically become a wannabee American oligarchic technology organization.

It says a lot of about the caustic effects of American business culture.

This what I was trying to setup when I first started (with Nginx, domain and free tier version of Google Cloud). I wasn’t able to get it all running with Nginx and HTTPS.

I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.

In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.

For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).

I would suggest looking into DietPi, it’s IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.

For that kind of money, I would expect the SSD drive to be able to provide some other qualities beyond technical things like capacity/bandwidth/latency.

Some very good qualities.

AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).

And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.

Don’t know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It’s been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.

One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a “quality per GB basis” (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).

Fair point. :)

The only reason I mentioned this is I have multiple family members who have by this point learned how to stream via bittorrent and how to use rutracker.

Why not just use something like rutracker.org ?

All the netflix releases are on there and vast majority of them can be streamed via bit torrent. Just select language defaults in your media player and you’re good to go.

Ah, Ok!

Thanks for the clarification!

And what if you don’t want to use crypto?

No disrespect to sane Americans, but I feel like Mozilla needs to move its HQ out of the US. Keep developers, lawyers and representatives for government/public relations, but find leadership that can think different and come up with truly novel solutions.

US tech scene seems too vapid and corrupt (I am not American, but I have lived there and I have perspectives from multiple close friends working in the US tech industry) and fundamentally unsuited for the challenges of our time.

I like Firefox on Android, you can run full uBlock and Dark Reader.

I would argue it’s not a good alternative and it’s fundamentally tied into the US oligarch system.

Brave got investment from the A16Z VC fund, they’ve been involved in multiple crypto pump and dump schemes (e.g. Axie Infinity).

I have a Raspberry Pi 4B. Clients can directly play the media without any need for realtime transcoding. I could 4K transcoding being challenging for older Raspberry Pi SBCs.

I’ve been using DietPi on my SBC home servers (NAS, media service, pi-hope, etc.) since 2017 or so.

It’s an excellent distro for headless operation and makes CLI easy to use for somewhat casual users.

Thanks for the clarification!

The web is unusable without Dark Reader and uBlock Origin.

Thankfully it seems that this is only for Dark Reader on Edge (not Firefox or Chrome).

Still worrying to see them integrate this fraudulent service.

I’ve been using it since 2017, it’s an excellent headless SBC operating system.

Their command line utilities are top notch and they have excellent support and development cadence.

When I read “open shell account server” I thought this meant anyone can get access programmatically. This sounded like a disaster.

But turns out, at least with the respect to this NetBSD specific offer, you have to send out an application.