Less danger than OPsec nerds hype up but enough of a concern you want at least a reverse proxy. The new FOSS replacement for cloudflare on the block is Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis, while Im not the biggest fan of seeing chibi anime funkopop girl thing wag its finger at me for a second or two as it test connection, I cannot deny the results seem effective enough that all the cool kids on the FOSS circle all are switching to it over cloudflare.

I just learned how to get my first website and domain and stuff setup locally this summer so theres some network admin stuff im still figuring out. I don’t have any complex scripting or php or whatever so all the bots that try scanning for admin pages are never going to hit anything it just pollutes the logs. People are all nuts about scraping bots in current year but when I was a kid allowing your sites to be indexed and crawled was what let people discover it through engines, I don’t care if botnets scan through my permissively licensed public writing.

Alright lemmy commenters you want the real secret sauce on How to live comfortably with the least amount of money? I can tell you my strategy. This won’t work for everyone, and many of you won’t like what I have to say.

loans and rent are a scam. Never go into debt, never open a credit card. Pay with the money you actually have saved up or learn to live without. don’t subscribe to anything recurring but phone and internet payments.

Live well below your means, not right at them or slightly above. If you live paycheck to paycheck and arent able to save up a dime for an emergency fund you will get screwed eventually.

invest in ways of generating passive income. diversify, have a portfolio, learn the difference between money, value, and assets. Leverage the concepts and apply them. Take a chance and put 100$ somewhere in the financial market, fail and loose some money, learn something from it, try again until you start growing money.

live out of your vehicle. Rent is a scam that preys upon your willingness to whore yourself out socioeconomically for quick illusionary scraps of safety and convinence that month. Any car, van, or truck can be converted into a liveable space. Its hard to adjust to such a different way of living at first but if you can do so the benefits of adapting to that kind of lifestyle is massive. You become your own landlord and pay yourself rent. Your only expenses becomes insurance and maintance.

Donate your plasma. It’s a relatively safe procedure, You can do it twice a week, and it provides a part time jobs worth of income.

Change your psychology. Society has ingrained upon us from birth a sense that our worth as human beings is determined by productivity and value we can provide.

You see a lot of people in the comments here rail on NEETs Who aren’t currently in the job market while still somehow living a life. Fuck that, I’m here to tell you that your life has intrinsic value. You and I werent put on this planet to slave away at jobs we hate to maybe one day achieve the dream of paying a 30 year mortage on some shitty suburbanite house. Thats not the life I dreamed of for for myself and I won’t be shamed for carving a way out of that speeding train to misery.

as long as you aren’t parasitizing your family living off their resources and found your own unique living situation thsat isnt burdening anyone, then go for it. Carve out a life of freedom where you can choose to sit on your ass and laise about without shame my friend.

You dont need to be employed all the time.You don’t need to work all the time to live a comfortable life. If you live the way I just described you can work 6 months or a year saving up the money and coast on the funds for a year or two before working again. You can be free to travel the country living dirt cheap for many many months. Is that NEET life? Maybe. But wouldnt you like a sabbatical like that? A break from the years of work grinding?

Develop skills and invest in infrastructure that improve your self reliance or reduce payments. Taking automotive classes and learning to fix your own car problems saves a lot of money. Learning basic electrical and plumbing if you want to go offgrid. Keeping yourself better warm in winter without central heating or cool in summer without central cooling. If you don’t want to live in a car then owning a piece of land and putting an offgrid home on it is next best thing for living without expenses.

This is a copy/pasted message I wrote up on another thread. As long as there are people in the comments shilling kagi, I will shill my prefered engines. At least my suggestions will bring awareness to free as in freedom projects. I hope to god people paying 10$/month just to not get datacucked by search engines will also learn something and save their money.

SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.

I personally trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, whos server is located on the other side of the planet, with my query info over Google/Alphabet any day.

Its nice to be able to email and have a human conversation with your search engine provider thats just a knowlegable every day joe who genuinely believes in the project and freely dedicates their resources to it. Consider sending some cash their way to help with upkeep if you like the services they provide, they will probably appreciate and make use of that 10$ better than kagi.

Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn’t seem to give good results try a few others.

Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query

search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won’t index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you. Its also open source and self-hostable

Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses peer-to-peer technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to both run their own local instance and help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets.

They have a public instance available through a web portal. To be upfront, YaCy is not a great search engine for what most people usually want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But, it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine looks like untainted by SEO scores or corporate money-making shenanigans.

I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I know these options are so unknown to most people.