This is the type of content I need in my life at the moment.

is the only “cloud” storage service I’m aware of that doesn’t charge for either right now

Hetzner doesn’t either for their storage boxes. They support Borgbackup, restic, rclone, SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV and SMB.

Most storage VPSes will include a decent amount of traffic per month.

I use Borgbackup, with borgmatic to configure and periodically run it. I have two storage VPSes “in the cloud”, and back up to both of them. My main storage VPS is a HostHatch one with 10TB space for $10/month. I got it during Black Friday sales in 2021.

If you do back up to multiple destinations, Borgbackup’s devs recommend configuring two separate backups, rather than doing a backup to one server then syncing it to the second one. This is to handle the case where one of the backups becomes corrupted.

Hetzner have decent deals on their “storage boxes”. You don’t get root access, but they support Borgbackup, restic and rclone in addition to the regular protocols (SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV, SMB).

Make sure you configure the SSH key to only allow it to run borgbackup in “append only” mode, so that malware/ransomware on the client system can’t delete the backups. This is a common issue with other backup solutions like rsync - the client has full access to the server, so a malicious user/code could delete the whole backup.

This isn’t strictly true because most games do still have a playable version on the disk

At least on my Xbox, there’s games where it wouldn’t let me play them unless some updates were installed. “day one patches” are very common in the video game industry these days.

legally transferable due to doctrine of first sale as I understand it.

The first sale doctrine applies to physical goods. The game companies are moving towards the games always being digital goods, and the disc simply being a physical license key for the digital games. I’m not sure if the doctrine would apply in the same way in this case.

The only difference between a physical and digital copy of a video game is the format of the license key (on disc vs attached to your account). In either case, you’re buying a license key that can be revoked by the manufacturer at any time. A playable game isn’t even on the disc any more, since games aren’t finished by the master date any more (so you need to have internet access regardless of if it’s a disc or digital copy)

At least California is doing something and forcing stores to make it clearer that you’re only getting a revokable license rather than actually buying the product: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426

Diaspora doesn’t use ActivityPub, does it? It’s still a Fediverse app though, and still fairly widely used.

It would be one hell of a stretch to assert that a single platform with its own home made protocol that doesn’t talk to any other technology in the entire fediverse as part of that fediverse. So at best you can say Bluesky has its own fediverse.

I agree with this.

Why is ActivityPub “the” Fediverse? “Fediverse” is very broad and encompasses multiple protocols, a lot of which predate ActivityPub becoming commonplace.

The original Fediverse apps are still around and don’t use ActivityPub. For example, StatusNet / GNU Social use OStatus and Identica uses Activity Streams / ActivityPump (which was the protocol before ActivityPub). diaspora (if it’s still around) used its own protocol too.

Some of the older apps have adapted to use ActivityPub, while some of them still exist in their own separate part of the Fediverse.

I haven’t tested it, but in the “select your DNS provider” step, see if acme-dns is in the dropdown list.

I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That’s the main thing I use Plex for.

For DNS challenges, I personally prefer using acme-dns. It’s a separate DNS server that only serves ACME DNS challenges. I felt a bit uneasy using an access token for my actual DNS host since it grants full read/write access to every record. acme-dns reduces the attack surface.

Let’s Encrypt follows CNAMEs and supports IPv6-only DNS servers, so you could just run acme-dns on a spare IPv6 address (assuming your internet provider has a static IPv6 range, or you have a VPS with IPv6).