Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don’t have, a lot of the time they’ll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.

If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they’re going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They’re not going to give it to some other company to use.

The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.

For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.

Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.

WAL mode makes writes a lot faster, which is sufficient for a bunch of use cases. Writers do still need to wait, but they have to wait for a shorter duration. It’s still not the right choice for write-heavy use cases, of course.

I felt like a grown up once I got my paperless-ngx setup up and running.

I have a Scansnap ix1600 scanner. Everything is automated once I insert a document and click the button to scan it.

1. Scanned documents are saved to an SMB share on my home server - it’s a built-in feature on the scanner.
2. Paperless-ngx is watching that folder and grabs the files.
3. Paperless-ai uses AI to add metadata to document (title, tags, correspondent).

For documents I need to keep a physical copy of, I give each document a consecutive ASN (archive serial number) using QR code stickers. When importing the document, paperless-ngx sees the barcode and attached the correct archive number to the document.

If I need to find the physical copy, I first find it in Paperless-ngx, look at the archive number, then look in a folder where the documents are arranged by archive number. Easy.

For backups I use Borgbackup with Borgmatic, to two different storage VPSes (hosted by two different providers in two different regions).

Interesting - I didn’t see that. They say “You can add your own copyright as well”, so you don’t have to give up your rights to the code. They do still need to comply with the terms of the Apache license.

Their contribution agreement forces you to give up copyright to them.

The license just looks like the standard Apache license though, which doesn’t require this. With the Apache license, contributors still own the copyright to their code, but they license it to the project. Did you see a document in the repo that says something different?

if you need a POSIX interface

SSHFS isn’t POSIX compliant. It doesn’t support hard links, file locking, atomic renames, full support for changing file permissions, umasks, and probably other things.

Versity S3 Gateway is another option that’s trying to focus on simplicity. https://github.com/versity/versitygw

Out of all these, SeaweedFS is the most scalable. Seaweed’s design is based off some of Facebook’s whitepapers about their warm storage system, and it works especially well for use cases that have a very large number of small files (like images).

SSHFS is very unreliable. At least use NFSv4 or even SMB/CIFS.

Practically every other object storage provider offers an S3-compatible API.

Maybe I just haven’t encountered any bugs that took a long time to fix. It’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m a software developer that focuses on front end development (full-stack but I like frontend more) so I’m pretty picky about UI/UX. Boost feels very nice and polished.

I like Boost.

Last time I said this, I got shunned for recommending a closed-source app. I generally try to stick to open-source, but Boost has a good UI, works well, and bugs are fixed quickly.

Thanks for the info. It looks like there’s no way to migrate from Conduit. If I reinstall from scratch using the same domain, and create an account again, will everything still work properly including federation with other servers?

My server is just for myself.

What did you end up doing? I’m still running Conduit at the moment and I’m not sure if I should continue using it, or switch to something else.

I like Pushover too. I’ve been using it for over 10 years now.

We still call them weeds. It’s called a whipper snipper because it snips weeds by whipping them.

Australia has been using tap to pay for around 15 years now, whereas QR codes weren’t in widespread use in the country until COVID. There’s no reason to switch from NFC to QR given practically every bank’s app natively supports NFC payments now (no need to use a third-party wallet if you don’t want to)

The US is a different story… It took a looooong time for NFC payments to be adopted. I’m an Aussie living in the USA, and some of the US banks I use didn’t support contactless payments until a few years ago!