I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.

Not really. As far as server equipment, I like to ride the top of equipment using DDR3. I can get DDR3 cheap. Sure, it’s not cutting edge, but it works nicely for my purposes. Now I did provision a box that uses DDR4 which is expensive; $437 USD expensive. I’m now trying to get over the sticker shock of a 5090 GPU so I can use it as a local AI machine. The box came with 32 GB ram, so I topped it off with another 96 GB RAM

but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicated a hundredfold across the internet.

I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.

This is the way. Silo all accounts. I use Firefox relay, and another service called BurnerMail. I can literally spin up unlimited email aliases. In fact, BurnerMail will allow you to specifically name the alias for the specific account. So, you could have reddit.5742@mailbeaver.net. Which is handy for filtering and directing emails to specific folders, including the trash can in your email client.

it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web.

It’s more than jarring. It makes me want to rage quit when I’m over at a friend’s house trying to help them work through an issue. Especially now that most people have migrated to Windows 11. So, now you have webpages of ads and popups, and the OS itself is inundating you with popups and ads. And it’s not like I haven’t spent hours with my friends trying to get them to cut that shit out.

I still run an instance of Windows 10 on a local account, but it has been severely detached from the mother ship and de-bloated. Telemetry, communications with Microsoft, etc, are handled by a very long host file. Services are to a bare minimum. Pfsense filters Microsoft crap as well. Now since updates are no longer being offered, that door has been shut too. So now, it’s just an OS without the umbilical cord to the mother ship.

I have a good stack of 2.5" and a stack of 3.5" HDD, but most are in the 1 to 2 TB range with a couple that are 500 GB. They’re salvaged drives that I’ve just been collecting. I guess I could daisy chain them all together, LOL, but I’ve been just saving them for emergencies. I have an old Seagate ST-225 20MB, but I framed that one in a shadow box as a curio.

I’m not trying to throw shade on your project nor am I trying to discourage you in any way. I think it’s a noble ambition. I hope you make a mint doing it. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to tell people ‘Yeah, I met the dude on Lemmy before he was so successful.’ But if 71 years of experience has taught me anything, it’s that it has to be so easy a cave man could do it - as if it just fell in your lap, and it has to be work and trouble free. Otherwise, the average Joe Schmoe citizen isn’t going to spend the time. Having a secure network takes work. Keeping up with updates and making sure they aren’t going to make the wheels fall off, takes work. Work is where the vast amount of people fall off the wagon.

I bookmarked your project and I’ll give it a serious look see. I will tell you that the demo site: oasis.circuitforge.tech, returns a bad gateway Error code 502 from Cloudflare.

Rock on with yo’ bad self.

Alright man. Best of luck. Give it a go. You’ll never know how it will turn out unless you try.

Saying it’ll never happen and giving up won’t make that 2% get any bigger

Again, you get a standing ovation from me for your drive. Emphatically, I hope you and others with your drive succeed. I’m just giving my perspective of being involved with people and their computers since the mid 70s. I’m no IT guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I like helping others with their digital devices, because it is my desire for everyone to use said digital devices in the most safe, private, and anonymous manner possible. If any morsel of my experience can help someone, then I’m all about it.

However, and for instance: It’s been back at the beginning of the year, I had almost a 2 hour ‘training session’ with a friend on how to effectively use UBlock Origin. Something so very simple but quite effective. But you have to ‘train’ it to get the most out of UBlock Origin. Three weeks later I’m over at his house and he’s disabled UBlock Origin because it was annoying. Work, yes it takes a little work to learn how to drive the bus, and that’s where most people fall by the wayside for just about anything, not just digital devices.

If you want to help beta test, I’m working on an appliance-level automated installer for provisioning home cloud servers.

I’d be willing to take a look at it. I’ve got a couple empty boxes around here. Back when Microsoft released their Home Server edition, I thought ‘Finally! I hope this catches on’. But they killed it. I’ve always thought some bright, young, entrepreneur could take a couple of small ThinkCenters, construct a server environment, put it in a box, with almost a fool proof, one touch button that went out on your network, connected all devices to that one small central server, deploy apps etc, and everything would be jippity jippity. The problem, however, with making things fool proof is that fools are quite ingenious little buggers.

Do we need to dim the lights?

Decouple people from big tech

I’m not making fun of what you’ve said, and I’m not talking down to you. That said, I like where you’re going, but that will never happen. You can mark it on the calendar: ‘That irmadlad asshole said - never happen’. On the one hand I applaud you loud and clear. On the other hand, we live in a global consumerist society. Corporate is just giving them their fix. That’s their plug.

My entire stack runs off a 14kw solar array

I have solar too. Hell I have solar on two barns. I like it. I often think about how far along we might be here in America if a lowly peanut farmer had not been ridiculed beyond belief for putting solar on the white house. Now, they were not what you’d call efficient, but it was a start. I think the next presidency took them down.

but your techiest uncle could host the entire family in a privacy cooperative, for instance

Oh no doubt. I’ve long since been a promoter of the notion of a server in every home. We live in a digital society. We have digital assets. These need to be centrally housed on a very secure server and backed up.

However, self hosters and homelabbers make up <2% of the world’s population. It gets even less if you differentiate between consistent homelab/self hosters and those who were just experimenting. Yeah, we do it, but not on a massive scale to even make a ding. Again, I like where your head’s at, but it’s not us we need to convince, it’s them. And they like their crack. Corporate likes their money.

I mean, I’m not saying give up. Keep pushing. But realistically, we’re in a script.

allow additional users it will not be fully open

Just for trusted friends or randos? If randos, have you ever been a mod? Never set up a Lemmy instance, but I have been a mod of quite a few Reddit subs. It’s a headache I will never engage in again.

Just in general or because you’re setting up a Lemmy instance?

If you’re using Firefox, then there are a plethora of cookie copiers. I used one, don’t know which now, a while back. Seemed to function for my purposes.

Oh you’ll smoke a turd in hell for your insolence. That would make sense. It’s much easier to complain.

Me too.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels

But it doesn’t.

… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

But it is.

So, now what are we going to do? Give me real world solutions that will actually fix the issue, which would be implemented by real world corporations and real world data centers. I’m not problem hampered, I’m solution based. So let’s fix it.

I use both Song Sleuth and Smart Bird ID (iOS). Fairly decent. I wouldn’t bet any significant bet on it’s accuracy 100% of the time. I’m no birder, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes.

Do what works for you OP. Don’t let 'em give you shit about your pony tail.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines

Didn’t downvote you however, are you saying if I ran an AI model local, that scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown is ok with you, just because it’s local?. Because that’s exactly what we’re are doing when we access the internet. Throw AI out of the scope, and we’re still pumping massive amounts of carbon in to the air, still turning the water brown. There are 8.4 billion people on this planet. Approximately 6.3 billion of them are online. That’s just individual humans. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of data centers that aren’t even connected with AI and all the energy production to make them run.

So, who will be the first to actually practice what you preach and shut down your servers and internet devices? C’mon…make the first step towards a cleaner planet.

If you’re speaking of audio analysis ML or AI models, they are quite efficient. As a mediocre musician, who is clinically deaf and cannot hear some frequencies with enough clarity to make a judgement either way, I lean on AI assisted audio mastering. I haven’t dabbled in AI generated music, but with the right DAW and a handful of plugins, some keyboards and instruments, you can do a lot right in the comfort of your home.