I’ve had exactly this same thought. Doing it client-side seems easy enough, it’s just like creating a multi-reddit and then when you want to post you have to choose which instance to post in.
The hard part is probably that these communities will have different moderators and different rules which complicates things substantially.
Yes. If you use Ghostery and are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Privacy Badger. It’s created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is free and open source. Great piece of software.
True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.
I’m a sysadmin as well and I consider spinning up a new instance and rebuilding a system from scratch to be an essential part of the backup and recovery process.
Upgrades are fine, but they can sometimes be risky and over a long enough period of time your system is likely accumulating many changes that are not documented and it can be difficult to know exactly which settings or customizations are important to running your applications. VM snapshots are great but they aren’t always portable and they don’t solve the problem of accumulating undocumented changes over time.
Instead if you can reinstall an OS, copy data, apply a config and get things working again then you know exactly what configuration is necessary and when something breaks you can more easily get back to a healthy state.
Generally these days I use a preseed file for my Linux installs to partition disks, install essential packages, add users and set ssh keys. Then I use Ansible playbooks to deploy a config and install/start applications. If I ever break something that takes longer than 20 minutes to fix I can just reinstall the whole OS and be back up and running, no problem.
It’s like looking through a telescope. Everything within the lens is clear and detailed, but anything on the periphery might as well not exist. Very useful state of mind for certain coding tasks.