So far what I found:

My router has an option to block internet access by MAC address, which is even better than by IP.

LAN mode works via wi-fi, so no cables or flash drives needed.

Also Orca slicer is almost the same as Bambu studio, even supports printer’s camera. Feels even snappier without an account and integration with “store” or whatever that online stuff is called.

Got more interested in trying out VPN now, so I probably could observe prints from a laptop in any location.

Not as bad as I feared, not as good as it could be.

It is complicated. I follow almost 500 accounts often producing 50 toots per hour. Nobody should spend that much time to catch up with all. My coping tools are:

• Making lists, including one for important accounts I don’t want to miss. Sadly I cant find a way to get notifications for those.

• Resisting FOMO. Remember, mastodon is people-centric, not topic-centric like Lemmy. I don’t try to use it as news source or catch all hashtags I care of. Just treat it as a space to casually look what people are talking about.

In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water. We should have resisted their harmful use, lack of transparency and user control, rather than the very idea. Controlling what content shows up first and setting your priorities is a good thing. Users should have this power, not corporations and not even admins.

For me it is not so much about personal privacy, as against concentration of power.

Insane money combined with capacity of invisible, precise manipulation of mass information is really hurting democracies. Big tech is already richer than most countries, and their negative influence is more visible than ever. So now we, who believe in democratic principles, have to vote not only with ballots, but also with our choices and our conscious attention. The least we can do is resist this concentration of power on personal level. Ideally - do it together.

I used it for a few years on Oneplus Nord, and a few days ago switched to pixel7 with LineageOS. First impressions are that e/os was much more usable out of the box.

I surely have worse experience with banking: Revolut and SmartID app just refuse to work due to rooted phone (worked well on e/os). Other bank app is somewhat more broken - on e/os it didnt fully load but at least showed notificatioms on each transaction, now doesnt and is useless.
Could be due to newer android version on LineageOS though, I didnt investigate that.

Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral “business as usual”:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo

I was lucky to find https://purelymail.com/ which fit my budget and needs - primarily supporting multiple domains for my family and personal projects without extra costs.

I also just use KDE connect on windows to exchange needed files or clipboard. Devices need to be on same LAN or VPN during exchange. Pausing PC media during calls is a nice bonus.

For syncing photo gallery and Obsidian I use Syncthing.

not sure about peertube audience size, but afaik it does have a serious subsystem of resource sharing.

If I understand it right… it will be much more costly to host videocentric platform than other types of content. A serious proposal for sharing the burden of hosting will likely be vital - through funding or decentralized storage/processing. Havent heard about that yet.

Just my emotional reaction: I am amateurishly selfhosting for more than ten years with only basic linux knowledge. This training is probably more focused on pros and general web development than self hosting. In my imaginary perfect world self hosting would be a common skillset taught in a secondary school.

same here

Technically Grav is not a static site generator, it is just a flat file cms. It means there is no need to generate all the files of website and upload them to server each time you write a post. I have no idea why people like static sites for blogging.

Just took the opportunity to try Thunderbird again and had to downvote myself :) I guess my previous frustrations were related to initial sluggishness while downloading and non-compacting loads tens of thousands of mails from gmail. It still takes some time, but after downloading and compacting my data, search seems to be very responsive.

I am using eMclient for several years now. I would have loved to use open source, but experience of using Thunderbird was unbearably sluggish and glitchy. Other options for windows were simply lacking. EM is far from perfect too, but still better. I hope to retry Thunderbird in upcoming years to check if things under the hood changed much.