I really like Ente.

Disadvantages:

• the photos that you’re self hosting are encrypted so if you want to have good sleeps you need to do daily exports
• Videos are also encrypted so no transcoding is possible. Client needs to download whole file before starting play (they say they have a solution coming for this)

Advantages:

• requires very little resources. The web album is static HTML and you can host it anywhere, even on GitHub pages, for free. Photos are saved in any S3 server, I chose garage. Then it has a postgresql database and a very light coordinator service. In total takes like 100mb of RAM.
• All the ML stuff is done on the client side when you’re browsing your photos (on mobile devices it’s disabled by default in order to not kill the battery)
• Desktop client can be set to automatically backup all your photos in background
• Because it uploads to S3 and S3 natively supports chunked uploads you can upload files bigger than 100mb if using cloudflare free (immich uses a workaround for this but only works on desktop)
• Uploads are resumable
• Doesn’t have breaking changes where you need to use specific docker images like other galleries

If you pay them, they host it for you: one copy on B2, one copy on wasabi and a backup on scale way.

If you don’t pay them, you need to provide a S3 compatible endpoint for storage, a postgresql database and a coordinator. Doesn’t need fancy stuff

I think 5 years ago, on Ubuntu

64 gb of ecc ram (48gb cache used by zfs) with 2tb drives (3 of them)

I have similar speeds on a truenas that I installed on a simple i3 8100

One day I had a power outage and I wasn’t able to mount the btrfs system disk anymore. I could mount it in another Linux but I wasn’t able to boot from it anymore. I was very pissed, lost a whole day of work

it is now a non issue

IMHO it’s still a big issue that might lead to data loss to someone else. The Windows client should be hardcoded to refuse syncing in onedrive folder.

Someone should reproduce this in a VM and open a GitHub issue

Edit: they already know this since a couple years, and the same happens on MacOS https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/4276

When you enter China, you have to run their application on your phone to fill the immigration form. Way more convenient compared to the paper slip, right? 😉

It’s this https://apkpure.com/zhong-guo-ling-shi/com.gov.mfa

Luckily, you don’t need to install full malware but only medium malware, there’s a way to run it as a web app inside tencent WeChat by scanning a special qr code.

I run this stuff inside insular because tencent is tencent and even on fully patched Android 15 without any file access permission they still manage to drop fingerprinting files disguised as images in /pictures/.gs_fs0

For connecting to my servers, technically ssh on standard ports isn’t blocked (otherwise it would hurt their bots, no?) but I don’t want to show my server IP address, so I use a hysteria2 proxy hosted on a Oracle VM in the Japan datacenter. There are services like doggygo that rent access to those proxys for literal pennies (like $2 per month) but payment need to do with alibaba’s alipay or tencent wepay which is ultra traceable (linked to Chinese id+Chinese bank account+Chinese phone number) and very stupid. Honeypot?

There are reports of evil maid attacks where a secret service agent poses as room cleaner in your hotel room and tampers with your laptop when you’re away, but for normal people this seems unlikely. Keep your electronics with you at all times, always use a VPN, check hashes of executables if really need to run them (better not) and you’re going to be ok

Using the Yuzu case for guidance, dumping encryption keys, regardless of the source of those keys, is illegal

This is false, as the case is non existant, because it has been settled out of court. It has to be proven in court that is illegal, as there’s no law that says that dumping the keys from my own hardware that i paid with my own money is illegal.