Nope, I live in Utah, US, which is mostly coal, natural gas, and solar, in that order, and we’ve been scaling coal back significantly and replacing it with gas and solar (and a little wind). We’re about average for the US:

The average cost per kWh in the U.S. as of January 2024 is 15.45 cents

That said, I heard that our local electricity company wants to hike rates, and that seems to be about $0.03/kWh. So my range would go up to $0.15-0.18/kWh, which still isn’t that crazy.

Here’s my current bill:

• usage - 420 kWh
• total - $58.86 (mix of winter and summer usage)
• stated rate - $0.09-0.10/kWh for “block 1”, 0.10-0.12 for “block 2” (they charge more the more you use)
• calculated average rate (inclusive of all fees and credits) - $0.14/kWh

And here’s my previous bill (all summer usage w/ AC and whatnot):

• usage - 522 kWh
• total - $80.17
• stated rate - $0.09/kWh for “block 1,” $0.117/kWh for “block 2”
• calculated average rate - $0.154/kWh

That’s why I gave the $0.12-0.15/kWh range, because it depends on time of year, total usage, etc. It’ll probably be closer to $0.12/kWh next month since we’d use hardly any electricity (we use natural gas for heat).

That really depends. If you’ll eventually get a NAS, I recommend a NAS HDD because they do better with 24/7 operation. They also use a bit less power than desktop HDDs (which you shouldn’t get anyway, just get an SSD for your desktop/laptop), if you care about that.

I use two WD Red HDDs in my NAS (just an old desktop PC), and I’ve had Hitachi in the past. I use SSDs exclusively for my gaming desktop and laptop though, because performance is a lot more important than cost.

Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.

8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.

But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.

I started and ended up bailing. The deciding factor for me was the way data is stored with OCIS (basically hashes), so backup/restore would be a much larger pain. So I’m sticking with Nextcloud as much as I hate PHP and dislike the performance issues.

Does this really need to be weekly? Surely a monthly or even quarterly update would make far more sense.

That doesn’t follow. If there’s a bad commit in Windows 10 or 11, I won’t even know about it. If there’s a bad commit in Grayjay, I can:

• not upgrade, or downgrade to an unaffected version
• report the issue on their issue tracker
• technically violate the license by patching it myself and building my own copy (probably fine provided I don’t distribute changes)

I can do exactly none of that with most proprietary software, so this source-available license is much better than those. Again, it’s not ideal, but considering it the same as every other proprietary software license is absurd.

It’s really not. Windows XP had its source leaked, it’s not source available. Grayjay is source available, so I can see every new commit before it hits my phone. That’s a pretty big difference, and it’s the most important when it comes to public security audits.

Grayjay is source available, which is better than nothing. I’d prefer FOSS, but the features make up for the poor choice of license.

Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I’m going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don’t need to).

On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don’t watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I’ll just look for a specific video or whatever.

I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay’s search kind of sucks.

Well, he didn’t write most of it, and reviews will never be perfect.

I liked FreeDNS when I used them, but that was something like 10 years ago. Could be worth looking into.

I’d look into Hetzner, their pricing is pretty fair and they have some nifty features.

Also check out Vultr, they have block storage and some interesting addons.

That’s where I’d start, but I haven’t needed to host anything like Lemmy.

Here are two somewhat reasonable routers that support 10G (via 2 SFP+ ports):

• https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_16g_2s_pc
• https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_16g_2splus

Both have max power draw under 50W, though I don’t know what they’d actually draw (would depend on how much traffic and whatnot).

And here’s a switch with 2 SFP+ ports with max draw of 11W: https://mikrotik.com/product/css610_8g_2s_in.

I only have a GPU because my CPU doesn’t have any graphics. I don’t use the graphics anyway, but I need it to boot. So I put our crappiest spare GPU in (GTX 750 Ti) and call it good.

I wouldn’t bother. If you end up needing it, it’ll take like 15 min to get it installed and drivers set up and everything. No need to bother until you actually need it.

Ooh, sounds quite practical. Would work even better with a cow, and you’ll get milk out of the deal too!

Hmm, is that waddling or flying power? Swimming?

Also, the only reason for the 3 horsepower is so the others can rest, so we’d probably need far fewer than 393.6 ducks, I think we could get away with <100, provided we can manage their sleep cycles properly.

Switches and routers are pretty low-power, so we could probably get away with some form of body heat -> electricity thing. Or a battery and put the horse on a treadmill every so often.

Lots of options. Here’s what I do:

1. HAProxy - uses SNI to match an HTTPS request to a service, without decrypting the connection
2. Caddy - manages TLS certificates, decrypts connections, and sends the request to the relevant service
3. Docker - each service runs in a docker container on the host
4. my router has static DNS entries for each of my subdomains, so I can do https://service.mydomain.com, and my traffic never leaves my LAN when I’m at home

I have HAProxy running on my VPS (Hetzner), and it routes traffic over my WireGuard VPN to whatever physical device on my internal network handles that service (i.e. 2). This allows me to add devices to my network as needed, and TLS certs all live on that device.

This is probably overkill for your setup since it sounds like you can talk to your home router from the internet (I can’t because I’m behind CGNAT), so you could drop #1 and just use Caddy, assuming you’re okay with having all traffic handled by a single device. Or you can see if your router supports SNI-based routing to handle what I’m using HAProxy for.

If you don’t need to share your services w/ anyone, you can have everything live inside of a VPN and just access it via that VPN. You can look into Tailscale if you want something dead simple, and I think Cloudflare offers something similar. I started with that, but decided I wanted to share a number of services with family members, and I didn’t want to force each of them to configure my VPN.

Eh, my Ubiquiti AP works pretty well, though it’s a bit annoying setting up the server software. I get way better range with it than I ever got with my previous routers, and I never have to reboot it (my Mikrotik router needs to be rebooted more often, and that’s rock solid as well).

I honestly haven’t had any issues, but I have a very simple setup:

• Mikrotik router
• UAP-AC-LITE

That’s it. No mesh, just a single AP and a single router. It works well, and I largely forget about it because it just works.

That said, I’m considering upgrading to a newer wi-fi standard, so I’ll be doing some research again. Ubiquiti was the best at the time, but I don’t have any particular brand loyalty, so I’ll get whatever seems to work well and is a reasonable price. I will probably keep this AP and add a second, so that’ll factor in as well (i.e. can I have two APs serving the same SSIDs? If so, how do I get them to work seamlessly?).