Im running my own instance. But yeah, videos from google servers won’t load behind a proxy. Or they might work for a while but then wont and then you have to switch vpn servers which is very annoying.

I use a small wireless logitech keyboard-mousepad so it works very well. I had to make exceptions in the router for googles video severs to bypass the vpn though.

My phone is on a wireguard tunnel into my router which puts my wireguard vpn in the same forewall zone as my home LAN. Internet access is routed through the tunnel and then through another tunnel to protonvpn and from there to the www. It was a bit elaborate to set up but it works. Wouldnt really recommend the setup for everyone, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to get working. I used Openwrt and policy based routimg plus wireguard for the tunnels into and put of the router.

Oh i have vaultwarden as well nowadays

As someone who went through this after trumps 2nd term and power grabs i can give you my process:

1. angrily unsubscribe all big tech subscriptions
2. make a protonmail and tutamail account, realize I like proton suote more and decide to subscribe
3. transfer all passwords to proton suite
4. download all photos and other from cloud to an external drive. TURNS OUT THIS TAKES SEVERAL DAYS WTF
5. angrily order a rasp-pi and an external SSD
6. use step by step tutorials from pimylifeup to install docker and immich. Fall in love
7. gradually (via help of google and GPTs) become confident enough with command line to start managing the server headless over SSH

Fast forward 6 months: My router is now running OpenWRT. With a few necessary exceptions my network access is always through ProtonVPN. My external devices are connected via wireguard to the router when not on home wifi and only after that reach the www. I have 24/7 access to my services from everywhere. My main server is now an old office mini pc running about 10 services. Im using borg for nightly snapshots(its a bit like apple time machine) and after that everything is backed up to another server at a friends house via rsync and ssh. I have a third mini computer whose purpose is to be my tv’s UI with access to services like the national broadcasts web ui and my own jellyfin and invidious (adless youtube client) The tv does not have an internet connection anymore. I even made a custom land page that automatically opens full screen in a browser when open my tv.

The point is: this builds gradually and you have fun doing it. …until it breaks :D The most painful parts involved networking so you can settle for LAN only at first to keep things simple

I really feel like people who are beginners shouldnt play with exposing their services. When you set up Caddy or some other reverse proxy and actually monitor it with something like fail2ban you can see that the crawlers etc are pretty fast to find your services. If any user has a very poor password (or is reusing a leaked one) then someone has pretty open access to their stuff and you wont even notice unless you’re logging stuff.

Of course you can set up 2FA etc but that’s pretty involved compared to a simple wg tunnel that lives on your router.

Meanwhile linux nowadays is ridiculously easy to install and can be run without issues on hardware that is almost 10 years old. I just bought an 8th gen i3 mini desktop machine for 100€ and it runs all my selfhosted services plus functions as a desktop. The bootup and general speed of the OS is on par with a 2000€ pc or mac for regular office use. Planned obsolense is obviously the reason you cant use those machines for more than 5 years without installing linux on them (especially the pcs)

People should stop buying new computers unless it’s needed for llm’s or games.

I actually got a call from the survey these are based on. While i dont know how they compile the answers into a score, i felt the questions were quite relevant.

Also, i feel finns score high because we are culturally modest people who enjoy the simple things in life. Are we physiologically experiencing more happiness than others? Maybe not. But we propably score high on measurements of how content people say they are. ”Cant compain”