I started on Gitlab, which was a monster to run. I moved to Gitea, until the developers started doing some questionable things. Now I’m on Forgejo (a fork of Gitea).

Yeah, all I know is that I am definitely seeing images loaded in from domains other than that of my instance as I load/scroll pages, which I want to be loaded via my instance for privacy reasons.

I believe the Pictrs is a hard dependency and Lemmy just won’t work without it, and there is no way to disable the caching. You can move all of the actual images to object storage as of v0.4.0 of Pictrs if that helps.

Other fediverse servers like Mastodon actually (can be configured to) proxy all remote media (for both privacy and caching reasons), so I imagine Lemmy will move that way and probably depend even more on Pictrs.

IIRC Lemmy preloads all thumbnails for posts in communities you subscribe to into pictrs to be cached for like a month or something. So, yeah…

The servers aren’t even identified in the listing as R610s (or E01S, they misread that as “EOLS”), so who knows…

Lemmy has a feature/setting called “Private instance” that I think could be used to achieve this, but I think that got broken at some point because it got tied to turning federation off… not sure what the current state is but may be worth looking into.

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin several years ago and haven’t really looked back. Overall I just didn’t like the direction plex kept going (pushing shit streaming services, central auth, paywalling features), and dropped it even though I grabbed a lifetime plex pass back in the day. The only thing I miss about plex was the ease of developing a custom plugin for it since you could pretty much just drop python scripts in there and have it work, though their documentation for plugin development was terrible (and I think removed from their site entirely).

I run my own for myself and some friends who don’t really use it. If you are interested in doing so I say give it a shot.

I love tinc, it’s so simple. I wish there were something just as easy that leveraged wireguard instead of whatever custom VPN/tunneling stuff tinc uses, as using it scares me with how seemingly little maintenance tinc gets. Like if tailscale/headscale and tinc had a baby, haha.

Is there a way to run tinc on your phone or similar? To me that’s another bonus of tailscale at least.

Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.

I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.