The ARR tools are basically a search engine website you host. The interact with a few other tools you have to have access to/pay for. Namely an indexing service and a (for some) a download service. They can use torrents, so you dont HAVE to pay for downloading, but using something like newsgroups is really nice and add reliability and security.
THe “ARR’s” basically then are just a fancy UI and scheduler and just search the indexing service, download the files you want, re-assemble them and copy them to the location you want (often a file share that your media player like Plex or Jellyfin will use).
You can set them to continually look for something too. So for Sonarr, it will auto-download new episodes as soon as they appear in the index. Or if you see a commercial for something upcoming, you can add it and monitor it and as soon as it starts showing up in the indexes it will download.
Only debt we have a mortgage we owe 226k on. Cars are owned outright and were paid off early. Student loans we paid off early. We generally live below our means. CC’s are used for general purchasing and paid off in full each month. They are basically a stop-gap for fraud protection.
There definately is something. They have a ton of products. I’d have to look through my list as well. The CSS runs switchos lite, but honestly its fine. I can do CLI configs (brocade, cisco, cisco smb etc) but its whatever.
At my parents house i have been using a Mikrotik RB260GSP since about 2016 on their net. It also runs swos and im not doing anything crazy on it (in fact i never bothered with VLAN’s there though i probably should setup a guest vlan. But its been fine for years now.
if the firewall can be updated regularly then sure.
Mikrotik makes perfectly acceptable switches at a reasonable price with a variety of features, vlan compat is pretty common. A MikroTik CSS610-8P-2S+in will give you 2 10 Gb sfp , 8 x 1Gbe with PoE+ and vlans for under 300 bucks.
Not currently, though I am considering it. Right now I host mine on a VPS in linode. Though i need to downgrade it, I built it with the expectationg of allowing joins, but recently decided just to keep it private.
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
This wouldnt work. You not only need to have a routable/real domain name, but the server likely needs access to the internet to allow fro federation, specifically ingress traffic, to work.
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?
Mine runs 24/7. Even if i hosted it at home it would be 24/7. Only issue is
I already use port 80/443 at home. So i would need to reconfigure NGINX to use a proxy, which could also break federation. I could do that, in fact I am pretty sure the ansible config uses NGINX proxy commands, just that I would have to customize it and Im lazy. I already have stuff on VPS systems in linode (blog, teamspeak etc) so its no biggy to have another one.
My internet at home can be flaky. For example I currently dont have power at home and while I normally run on UPS for a time, and can cut to generator when I am home, my network just went into auto-shutdown.
Excatly why I never opened my instance. With it just being me, i can control what is on it and what is synced. There was too much risk with CP/CSAM type stuff. Heck I didnt even want to risk my linode account (aka they shut my other VPS systems down) due to TOS from shenanigans.
That said, I can still contribute just fine with my own instance and dont have to be involved in these drama defederation actions.
I would encourage anyone that is willing to criticize an instance maintainer for their decisions on risk to just roll out the lemmy-ansible setup and go your own way. If you troll or act in bad faith, you will get defederated. If you act like a reasonable person, no one will even notice. And that way you are in control of uptime, patch cadence, backups etc.
The custom emoji’s was a developed feature of Lemmy pushed out in their UI code. Even the project mainters instance was affected. Its why 0.18.2 was released.
Thats not on server/infra operators. It was a vuln in the core UI code. Some operators DID patch it themselves (i think Beehaw is one), others were less affected (ie: My instance is closed and i dont use custom emjis anyhow), but those are features introduced by the maintainers and some of the bigger instances would get requests for them anyhow. So it was a problem.
I think my point is for me and in my specific use case, I actually search less.
For example if I am debugging a process or working through some setup, I will often have to iterate through a series of searches with tweaks in DDg and sometimes even google. Using tweaks like site:some site.com, quoted portions of queries to reduce useless returns etc.
Kagi, again for me, had helped reduce that. I can’t often find a very quality source in the first query or two.
So the limit wasnt hugely a problem. I was actually VERY concerned like you because above 10 dollars is pretty steep. I initially signed up at 10, set limits not to exceed 15 and figured I would cancel and either submit a request at work for an annual or just ditch it.
Luckily two things happened that retained me. The first I already mentioned. The second was they bumped the quota to 1000.
Again I may still jsut see if I can get work to pay it out. But at 10 bucks it’s digestible, for me, for the value add. I also do no filtering. Just search whatever random shit I think of n the shitter in addition to curated work searches.
I’m not trying to sway you. Idgaf if you use it or not. Just trying to help provide useful information because for me, it was more “ehhh let’s see how it works out”
Finally, I have reached out to Vlad about suggestions and even corrections on things, both in the product and ancillaries (like their documentation). He’s responded each time and even corrected some of the issues. Which is really nice.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.