Not entirely the case. There are several companies that market primarily to business users that offer freebies to hobbyists -because those hobbyists sometimes eventually get to buy services for their employer.

Parquet is great, especially if there is some reasonable way of partitioning records - for example, by month or year - if you might need to only search 2024 or something like that. Parquet is great for only needing to I/O the specific variables you are concerned with, and if you can partition the records and only subset a fraction of them, operations can be extremely efficient.

Their brilliant idea was to combine the amazing Wireguard with all the ideas from the VOIP world for performant p2p connections of mobile devices. That gave them a head start but especially with headscale existing, anyone can replicate that. Now, their business depends on being the slickest option for managing authentication, users, devices, and ACLs for businesses. The writing is already on the wall for selfhosters - we don’t really need all those features.

Headscale already exists and the Tailscale clients are open source.

Use a web shortcut to the website for the forecast of your town, not an app.

There’s a lot you can do to lock down iOS using official features. Go through all the app privileges, especially location, get rid of widgets, lock down your iCloud authentication and enable e2e, disabling web access to iCloud, etc.

I use good old wallabag for read it later because of how well it works in fbreader on my Kobo. Linkwarden for the bookmarks. It’s not really bloated if you think about how the archiving preserves copies of bookmarks in case the site goes down, and more crucially, allows for full text search.

I wonder if there might be some super common spam tlds like .xyz or .ru or something, but generally, yeah, custom domain isn’t the issue. Some other options are Migadu, mailbox.org, mxroute, and Tuta all seem like decent companies. A lot of others “also do” email hosting, like porkbun and OVH. Plenty of companies host their email with all these companies and have mostly clear sailing without being spam binned.

Porkbun + runbox here. Domain and email together cost less than $30 a year. You can use the domain for free with GitHub pages or cloudflare for a free website too.

Other reason is the renew fees for special tlds are so unpredictable. Com is surprisingly cheap to renew.

That’s not an issue with a custom domain name, but one of the other parts you run into, SPF and DKIM dns settings being correct and the reputation of whatever SMTP server’s ip address is. No one spam-bins based just on random domain names, or every business would freak out. You can also use your own domain on Google, Microsoft, or Apples ecosystems, not that you need to, there are plenty of providers that will host your email. I like runbox.

Couldn’t agree more.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there

As evidence, I’ve heard people talk about worrying their phone is listening to their conversations. It’s not that they don’t care about privacy, it’s that they don’t even know what’s possible. With all the data collection that is happening, the data brokers are already selling a dataset predicting that you are going to be shopping for new baby items and what types of manipulative tactics are likely to work on you well before you talk to your friend about it.

There’s certainly also the aspect of simply “nerds who want to experiment.” I know I’ve tried out weirdo encrypted messengers and such in the past, just to never actually use it for anything and delete it. If you are smart, you know the difference between an experiment and sage advice. Boring stuff like the EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense suggest the reasonable tools for a spectrum of people’s threat models, but those things were all once experiments too.

Yeah, basically. It does bundle wireguard so that it can reverse proxy services over that. That’s probably what you were thinking of.

Pangolin Is a reverse proxy for TLS/https. Headscale is the self hosted Tailscale.

Indeed, the “evilness” of apple is really directed more frontally at app developers. That’s their cash cow.

That’s a bit extreme to worry about. If the app is disabled and has no permissions, it can’t run or share your data with Meta. It’s just sitting there wasting storage space.

I have Tailscale (actually headscale) set up on all my devices and the performance is good enough I don’t turn it off when I’m home and on the same lan as my server. The connection is p2p so it’s just a little encryption overhead. When I travel to other networks like my mobile network, or various corp wifi networks, it continues to try to get a p2p connection. Only sometimes corporate wifi networks block p2p and the traffic round trips through my VPS. It does take a lot of load off the VPS compared to the old way with openVPN. It also continues to work “for a while” if the VPS is down.

Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.