Your choice of imagery made me snort my beverage right back into the cup. Thanks… I guess.

Like they said:

a bunch of fanatics

With regard to climate change, even China appears more sane and reliable than the U.S.

Why not call it the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? What, that one’s taken already? Well, with the pace of U.S. self-destruction, there’s a non-zero chance that it will become available again, isn’t there?

And Orbán, Le Pen, Farage, Weidel, Fico, Georgescu, Vucic, Nawrocki and all the other traitors would willingly hold the backdoor open for the fascists in East and West.

I agree, this can be a strong boat that carries us far into a better future - but we need to plug the holes ASAP.

Been self-hosting it for a while now and love it. Try Tempus if you’re looking for a good Android client app.

Got into self-hosting for this very reason. I’ve been running immich (the FOSS basis underneath Pixelunion) for 1.5 years now. I’ve even bought a server license to support the team. It’s ridiculously good software!

Note that I’m not even a techie or network guy by trade (though I’ve travelled far down the rabbit hole since). Spinning up immich on a local computer (not even a dedicated server) to make backups is relatively easy. If I could do it, it’s not unlikely you can, too.

Thanks for the Quobuz suggestion, which has come up in another posting here. I’ll make sure to check it out!

3. listen primarily to indie artists who have fan donations set up (albeit this is more work on your part due to decentralization) is to pirate the music, figure out how much you’d have paid on the music platform, and then directly donate to the artist, giving them (basically) all the money.

Good call! I’ve considered that route, but I couldn’t find (m)any donation opportunities for the bands I’m interested in, and if so, it’s mostly American platforms again (Patreon…).

A man of culture, I see! I’ve been an avid CD ripper all the way through the 2000s and 2010s. Yet, times are a-changing, and I want to try and forego the extra step physical media, which will only be opened once anyway and then just take up space (either in my house or somewhere else). Donating to a library is a good idea theoretically. I just have my doubts they’ll be prepared to reserve ever increasing amounts of shelf space for obscure extreme metal albums…