Craigslist in my area is at least 90% spam, FB Marketplace is also not super active. OfferUp is pretty popular though.

Yep. To expand on this if people still want to use social media, here’s what helped me. The constant doom scrolling is unhealthy and unhelpful.

1. Block or mute news/doomsday communities/people on social media. Link aggregators and algorithm-driven social media just sucks for news across the board. Use Lemmy (or Reddit, etc) for memes, interesting discussions, cool pictures, whatever, but not news.

2. Collect a list of news sources you trust and add them to an RSS reader. Ideally in a separate folder from other feeds so you can easily filter them out when you aren’t interested in world news. You only get one “post” per article, rather than seeing the same “everything sucks now” article reposted to 20 different communities, and it’s buried in good ol’ boring news. Everything is less exciting in this format, it’s great.

That Bad Omens album is so good. I really need to listen to more Sleep Token too.

There are so many, if I had to limit myself to just a few highlights though:

Starset - Horizons

The Glitch Mob - Revisions

Skrillex - Quest for Fire

Northlane - Obsidian, Alien

Noisia - Closer

Erra - Erra

Polaris - Fatalism, The Death of Me

The Chemical Brothers - For that beautiful feeling

Justin Hawkes - Existential

Poppy - I Disagree

Porter Robinson - Nurture

Muzz - The Promised Land

HEALTH - Rat Wars

There’s just so much good music out there, especially recently.

I like to host as many services as possible and I’m fine with it being a second job at times since this is my main hobby, but I actually agree with you on your examples. The three things I won’t self-host are:

1. Emails - I am not willing to put in the effort on this. Plus, my ISP blocks those ports so I’d already be into using a VPS even if I wanted to host this. I’d rather just pay someone else, like Proton.

2. Password manager - I actually did self-host Bitwarden for a long time, but after thinking about it for a while, I decided to take the pay someone else approach here too. I’m pretty sure I’m doing everything correctly, but I’m not a security expert. I’d rather be 100% sure my passwords are in safe hands rather than be 95% sure that I’m doing everything right on this one.

3. Lemmy - I’ve heard about (luckily never seen) CSAM attacks on Lemmy/Kbin and will not risk that kind of content being downloaded because I’m federated with an instance dealing with those attacks. I’m happy to throw a couple bucks at lemmy.world’s Patreon and let them handle that.

I’m absolutely at that point with Nextcloud. I kind of didn’t want to go the syncthing route, but I’ll probably give it a shot anyway since none of the NC alternatives seem any better.

This is probably what I’m doing wrong. I’m using linuxserver’s docker which should be okay to auto update, but it just continuously degrades over time with updates until it becomes non-functional. Random login failures, logs failing to load, file thumbnails disappearing, the goddamn Collabora office docker that absolutely refuses to work for more than one week, etc.

I just nuke the NC docker and database and start from scratch every year or so.

I think I got Snapchat and Vine mixed up or combined in my head. I’ve never used either one, I thought it shut down years ago, but what I’m remembering is Vine shutting down.

I’m surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would’ve guessed <500k. That’s awesome. I’m also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn’t know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I’m just out of touch on social media stuff.

Google has trained me to think “I wonder if that still exists” every time I remember one of their products.

The Google graveyard is vast.

The Beginner’s Guide is excellent, it’s always surprised me how little I see it talked about.

I had a similar issue, it ended up being a hardware problem (my SAS expander specifically). Make sure everything connecting your drives is working correctly.

Navidrome’s smart playlists can do some of this. You’re basically building filters for songs to be added to a playlist automatically though, it’s not as “smart” as Spotify.