why does there need to be an alternative? is there something wrong or inefficient with it? is it just too old?

i’ve been using prepaid for almost a decade now and i only buy $100 androids with the latest release and i use my voip number for everything.

i started doing the prepaid plan because i don’t always renew each month since i only need the data connection and i’m almost always at home. the $100 androids are a thing for me because i’m klutz with all personal electronics. so it’s more like i accidentally stumbled upon this form of privacy rather than seeking it out from the onset.

and setting up the vpn on the server itself is not an option? how about using a browser plugin?

i’m unfamiliar with mullvad; is the container hosted on your laptop? is it split tunnel?

for heat: you’re either going to want a blade serve with lots of fans or big, mostly empty case.

it the length of 3 spinning platter harddrives and the width of 3 of them; it’s smaller than my actual toaster.

i have all of those things on my ubuntu server; but i wouldn’t characterize all of them as enterprise-grade . my ubuntu server it’s based off of off-the-shelf hardware from a couple years ago and it does all of those things that you described plus more.

it’s my wifi router; my data storage backup; my home made security system; my media server inside; & my cat’s favorite warm spot all within a tiny case the size of a toaster with lots of harddrives. it uses 2 kvm/qemu based virtual machines on top of the bare iron and they both use pci-passthrough; the first virtual machine is based off of the pfsense soft firewall & router and also serves to air-gap the bare iron server from the internet and the second virtual machine is windows 10 and serves to provide wifi 6 & 7 speeds with the windows ap driver.

i wouldn’t describe any of it as enterprise grade since they’re a bit hacky: for example, the server is mostly headless; but i did install the xserver & vnc because i use the motion project along with a bunch of old androids to create a homemade security monitoring system and that requires a browser. this means that i can now access the server’s gui anywhere than i want; but it’s subject to vnc’s limitations.

however the things that come from the soft firewall are definitely enterprise grade: the vpn works well and i can use both it and ssh from anywhere in the world to access my home network and i could theoretically add in a remote check in capability from a new project that reacts to incoming connections.

the only thing i don’t think it could do i the high temperatures; the case is compact so i doubt that its thermals are any good.

mine’s bilingual. lol

even if you don’t speak the language?

i wonder how this person and snowden’s employability fares in their new home countries.

on physical keyboards there’s usually an alt key combo you can put in.

they’re disabled and the last time i needed it was years ago; i also didn’t turn it back on to use it back then as well. lol

even on my phone; it’s more convenient to just switch languages than find that character. jeje

dedicated key on the keyboard

not on us keyboards; hence all the anal. i literally have to find a source to find ñ and á to copy/paste it. lol

it’s worse when you do speak the language, but your laziness in one language affects the other: in spanish, if you leave out the punctuation like it’s english, you could accidentally end up texting people that your potato is into anal gangbangs instead of into how much your dad likes new years parties. lol

mi papa disfruta fiestas por ano neuvo (my potato likes new anal gangbangs)

vs

mi papá disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (my father likes new years parties)

i got caught in a soft version of this when i reported a former employer to my state’s labor relations board; i literally had to move across the country to become employable again.

these seem much worse since they affect more than your livelihood and part of me is glad that i’ll be dead before americans start to accept that these lists are a thing.

It’s only seems like doomsday if you don’t learn from the people who had encountered it before and wrote down their experiences.

Empowerment is a side affect of knowledge; yet most Americans will never bother to avail themselves to the knowledge from people like marx or MLK Jr and that only leads us to those needful mental health breaks over and over again without ever fixing the root cause.

i don’t know much about stallman; but little i do know makes me want to agree with this. lol

i didn’t know that he was behind it; the licensing details are confusing to me as all legalese is.

I would work in a supermarket

that’s what i’m doing in spirit. lol

it’s only in spirit because i lucked out and found someone with a need for my skills but at a SIGNIFICANT pay cut and it’s a non-profit organization that actually helps humanity so i feel that it’s slightly better than a supermarket for me.

i think that your experience is the most common experience that moonlighting & ex-redditors have with lemmy and is the biggest “sore spot” that most lemmings have.

like you, i hate how big tech enshitifies social media and that’s been making me move from one social media platform to the next since the 1990’s (since before it was called social media). i’m convinced that the enshitification is pushed by big tech’s investors in an effort to squeeze out as much profits from the platform as possible; resulting in the types of enshitification that you see on reddit, or facebook, or bluesky or etc. i think that this fact gives lemmy the best chance out of NOT enshitifying, or at least not as fast as reddit or bluesky did.

i used to be on reddit too, but lemmy works better for me and i think it’s because of what it was designed to do; it’s as if all the left leaning political subreddits (eg r/communism, r/socialism, r/anarchy, r/politics, etc.) got together to create their own social media safe space on the fediverse away from reddit’s toxicity. so they did in lemmy and; when the investors pushed u/spez to enshitify reddit; a whole bunch of people left reddit and filled the ranks of lemmy.

when that happened this tankie safe space did the same thing that its real-world counterpart safe-spaces-for-the-ostracized spaces do. like gay neighborhoods, they got gentrified by a MUCH LARGER group of people with better finances and social connections and, during the transition, there’s lots of things that the gentrifiers don’t like, like late night loud music; or lack of schools; or the “politics” (in this specific situation).

the gentrifiers usually succeed eventually and those pesky life-altering politics will be pushed aside like the high rents & $10 coffee shops push away the artists and agitators that originally made the neighborhood an attractive place to inhabit and they’ll go do it all over again in some other neighborhood somewhere else once they’re successfully pushed out where the cycle of humanity repeats itself all over again.

it’s one of the several other examples that i pulled out the thin air and probably not the most appropriate in helping me make my point.