Spiderman is what got me to purchase a PS4. I've rebought almost everything on PC though so I think I learned my lesson this time (still waiting on Bloodborne and Ghost of Tsushima 😞).
Toribor
Back in 2016 or so you could get a RaspberryPi 3 for $35. Add a $5 power supply, $5 SD card and $10 case (or 3d print your own) and you've got a nice little piece of hardware for running a tiny project at home for ~$50. More than enough for hosting some simple web services, backup software or something like Home Assistant.
Plus it was popular (which makes it even more popular). It's always been very easy to find guides written specifically for the hardware, despite it's limitations.
I think the value proposition has been dropping steadily though. They cost more, are hard to find and there are now a lot more competing SBCs on the market. RaspberryPi still has name recognition though, for now.
There is a community Ansible module for the Uptime-Kuma API that I've been trying to get working so I can trigger the maintenance window when I run my playbook to update services but I haven't quite figured it out yet.
I'm in the same boat though, I start updating containers and my slack channel blows up for like five minutes straight.
I've got Uptime-Kuma internally for watching all my internal services and then I've got one running on a VPS that watches all the external services and public endpoints.
Such a great project and so easy to use..
FreeDNS requires you to log in to their website once a month or so to keep your DNS name active or they will revoke it. DuckDNS doesn't require that. It's free and it works. I set it up forever ago and never have to touch it, with FreeDNS I was risking losing my name or having my services go down if I missed their nag email.
I'm starting to think we just need to rebrand green energy projects to sound more like a tech concept to trick people into liking it more.
It's not solar, it's LightWave.
Saying that you'd end a war by giving the aggressor everything they want is some real 10th dimensional Parcheesi.
I wonder if we need 'aggregate communities' where communities across instances can agree to share a set of rules and guidelines. You still have to pick which community to post in but the content itself can be browsed like one large community, similar to a 'multireddit'.
Not sure if this would work in practice but it could be a way to merge communities across instances. It's been something I've been thinking about to address fragmentation without solving it by centralizing around one big platform.
It's going to be really difficult to get most people used to the idea of decentralized federated services.
My dongers have never been higher.
Ansible vault. All my config files and scripts are deployed with Ansible. Usually they are pushing those into a file or environment variable but if you scope permissions narrowly and don't run services/containers as root you should be somewhat safe. If someone has filesystem access you're already in big trouble.
Instead I'd focus on keeping your attack surface as small as possible. Keep services behind a VPN or segment public facing services to a separate VLAN or docker network.