Okay, lots of other comments I didn’t read, and this might have been mentioned.
👏Syncthing👏
You mentioned OneDrive. I also jumped around storage solutions as I explored the FOSS world, and nothing hold a candle to Syncthing (in my opinion, but I want/need to try nextCloud). I won’t drone on about it, but if you’re looking to ditch another big data company that’s probably scraping your files, check out Syncthing
To be totally honest I didn’t look through everything you posted, but I’ve toyed with the idea of intranets myself and have come up with a handful of tools I really like.
The way I’ve used this to make an “Intranet” is outlined here. I use Obsidian for a lot of note taking, link storage, and general information gathering and navigating. Obsidian stores all it’s files as plain text in a normal folder structure, but this could also be done with htlm files and a normal browser. I can target any portion of these folders with Syncthing and keep them updated across all my devices through my Tailnet. The broader usage of this begins to get into the idea of an intranet.
Let’s say I meet someone within this community, or maybe from one of the other locations. We get to talking and decide to exchange information from our respective collections. I fire up an ad hoc WiFi network off of say my phone, or a small portable router, add them to my Tailnet, which could even be optional given Syncthing’s built in encryption, add their devices Syncthing ID to the folder I want to share with them. They download a local copy of whatever data I want, and then can return to a hub of their own, maybe a home network, or a larger community wide network. Target the new data they have acquired, and sync it to the hub. We could then remove each other from our Tailnets and Syncthing instances, or leave them so we can automatically update differences when in proximity.
That’s a rough idea of how I think this system could be used for a more “personal” internet. One that focuses more on direct and intentional communication and data storage, where each user or group of users is basically selecting which data they value enough to commit drive space to. I have also researched medium and long range “WiFi” networks using radio or other signals to trickle sync nodes over longer distances. I’ve even been inspired by Factorio’s logistic drone networks and thought to attach portable routers, single board computers, and storage drives to drones or even solar gliders that can trickle sync to nodes they pass over.
Just some ideas that don’t quite fit the different systems you mentioned, but I think are a bit easier to spin up for individual users, and could decentralize the load of what you are trying to do even more. Could maybe post this in some of the other FOSS/networking/linux/privacy communities, but I’d maybe clean up the post a bit and make it clearer what you are after.
At my time of adoption, Telegram had a better feature set and I wasn’t honestly super focused on the privacy minutia. Knowing what I know now…I guess Signal, but honestly I’d probably go even more niche if I was after something truly private. Like P2P messengers or something like that. I don’t really treat any messaging platform as fully private. If I really need something guaranteed to be private and I don’t want to try to convince a friend to install a new, even more obscure app, I’d probably just encrypt text files and generate keys for each other and send them via something, maybe email idk.
Yeah okay. That is the system I tried first. Glad it worked for you so cleanly. My network tab was inconsistent of grabbing stuff for some reason, but Libby also doesn’t seem to work through certain VPNs so seems like it’s all somewhat sensitive. Maybe I’ll give it a shot again!
I used to manually port games to macOS using wine/wine tricks/wine bottler, and honestly it’s not that bad. Especially if using GUI versions of all of those. Yes it takes fiddling and tweaking and a decent amount of failure, but I found it worth it once I succeeded in doing it once. That was almost a decade ago, and while I haven’t tried it since (I rely mostly on steam at the moment) I have a few games from say GoG and other places I’m planning to manually port. Ignore the haters, and just go for. Read/watch a tutorial, fail miserably for a while, and eventually you’ll tweak enough parameters and change enough values you’ll find what works. Once you do that for one game all the others will be easier. Every game is a bit different, but the freedom and knowledge you’ll gain is great. If my 13 year old ass could do it on a school issue MacBook to share Skyrim to all my friends you can definitely do it with more modern tooling.
EDIT: I think at one point I ported the windows version of steam, and then could use the “add non steam game” option and then could simply hit run. Didn’t work for everything, but there was a handful of games that was a quick and dirty work around for.
Woah, what system did you find? Sounds way simpler than what I’ve figured out. I’ve read posts about capturing traffic from the network tab of the web inspector but I got really mixed results. That does work, but it was enough of a pain that I explored other options.
The system I eventually found was on Android Libby store files from audiobook unencrypted. They try to hide them by splitting books up into lots of files with random names and distributing them across random folders within its data folder. It even includes some junk folders and files to try and throw you off. None of these files have files types/extensions and Libby tacks on .mp3 when it comes time to play them.
How this can be exploited: I have an android device but this can also be done with Windows Subsystem for Android, or really any other android emulator. I have targeted the parent folder to all that with Syncthing and set it as a one way sync. This way whenever audiobook files are added they are copied to one of my other devices and because it’s one way sync when my loan expires those files disappear from the Android instance, but persist on the device I’ve copied them to. Next step is filtering out all the junk files. This is shockingly easy as I just click into the windows file browser search bar and hit enter. This serves to show a list of any file of any name of any type in all sub folders. Then I just sort the results by size. Libby doesn’t bother to make the junk files the same size as the “mp3s” (remember they don’t say .mp3 yet) so it’s easy to just truncate the list when the files stop being in the kilobytes and start being megabytes.
What’s left is a list of file that want to be .mp3. I use a command line based batch renaming tool to add all the endings, and then begins the painful task of listening to each file to find where in the book it’s supposed to go. The splits do not line up with chapters, so it’s sometimes handy to have an ebook copy to search for phrases. I put them in order then load them all into audacity, merge and then use the detect silence tool set to between 2 and 4 seconds to try and detect the chapter breaks. I’ll manually clean up any misplaced breaks, export as individual files and then finally use one of the many audiobook binding tools out there to bundle it all back together. Though I mostly do that when I’m sharing the book with others. My préférée audiobook listening platform tales individual files very nicely, so I can save a step if it’s only for myself.
I’m both an iOS and Android user for various reasons. There is a free KeePass front end for iOS, but I paid a one time lifetime license for one that was a little more feature rich. That and the only version of Syncthing for iOS requires a like $4 purchase to allow you to sync folders outside of its default location, which was a pretty necessary feature for me.
Yup. Same system here. I really like it.
I do keypassXC and Syncthing. It’s cross platform with only a couple bucks needed for lifetime access to all all necessary features depending on platform. Besides I use Syncthing for a bunch of other stuff as well, so it fits right into my flow. I’m considering moving to a command line tool simply called Pass, and still syncing with Syncthing, but I’ve yet to pull the trigger on that switch yet.
Thanks so much!! Seems like a cool service. Reminds me of popcorn time, which I don’t think works anymore. Are you still routing all your traffic through a VPN when using that? Seems like a privacy nightmare should any action be taken against those companies.
Could you elaborate? I looked up both services and it seems to just be a media front end and a downloading tool. How does that get you the actual files to watch.
Look up Syncthing and then never stop trying to replace closed source and paid software/services. Like any time you launch something ask yourself “does this hit the same way as when I swapped to Syncthing?” If the answer is no you then put “[name of thing you want to replace] foss alternative” into your search engine of choice. You’ll end up down so many rabbit holes, but you’ll come out the other side a whole lot better at making your technology work for you, not the company that made it, and with a suite of free open sourced tools you are in complete control of.
Here are some tools I use that are super easy to get going.
Those are the ones that got me going and I personally believe act as a solid core. Most people will find all of those useful. Other services are more user specific, but that’s a lightweight bundle of software that your RPi will handle well. Much more and you might want to look at beefier hardware.