I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.

• Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.

Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.

I have used any number of Spotify downloader apps to back up my music accumulated from other sources.

I can’t believe you beat me to this. Well done.

Edit: I guess great minds think alike.

There are some striking studies about how use of LLMs impacts cognition. You’re not wrong.

I switched to Thunderbird about a year and a half ago.

Last week I had to help a coworker with their Outlook and holy shit is it so much worse than when I dropped it. There is so much AI garbage in every little thing and bad design getting in the way of just sending and receiving emails.

Same thing for the other office products

Good thing no one found out! /s

Second this - so far it has cost me money, but as I am able to cancel more subscription services, the savings will add up.

This is available as old.lemmy.world

Re tailscale: not sure if it is a technical issue or not, but my wife found it helpful when I added a toggle to the Quick Settings menu, which shows when it is running and can restart it with one tap.

I ended up spinning up audiobookshelf. It’s fine for audiobooks, and I immediately installed Lissen (alongside ABS) and it is clearly preferable to me.

Lissen does not recognize ebooks at all, and I also didn’t have success with the comic book I tested on the ABS client, so I may try another service for those. For now audiobooks are the higher priority and I am very happy with those. Thanks for the input - I really appreciate it.

Thanks, this is really helpful! Do you use the same app for both? Is it the abs client or something else?

Looks very cool! I don’t know that I have the resources for it on my little homelab but good to keep it in mind in the future.

Anyone who likes this idea might also be interested in checking out RTranslator, an open source, on-device app, which has some similar functionality. You can connect two Bluetooth devices using this app to communicate between two people in different languages.

It can’t translate multiple speakera simultaneously or clone voices, but it’s very useful for traveling or communicating with friends and family in multiple languages. Especially since it does not need any connection, it comes in handy on the road when you might not have a reliable connection.

Can I ask what stands out with Kavita that audiobookshelf lacks?

I think that’s a great way to start. It is surprisingly easy to add remote access at a later date.

The dead simple way is to set up a shared folder with Syncthing, although you will end up with all of the files copied onto every device.

If you want the files to live on your home server to be accessed as needed, then you will want something like Nextcloud or OwnCloud. Personally I found ownCloud easier to set up, but it has far fewer features.

If the focus is on pictures and videos, then you should probably start with immich. It is very simple and incredibly powerful. You can more or less set it up once, and not think about it too much other than running an update from time to time. It supports multiple users, etc. Note that if you are adding photos from a Google Takeout, you will want to run a one time script to rescue the metadata (date, etc.)

Any of these are accessible on any device.

I currently use antenna pod for listening to podcasts and I love it. Am I understanding correctly that you also use it for audiobooks? Does show each chapter as a separate episode or how does that work?

I’ve read some places that Calibre can be finicky. Have you had to troubleshoot any issues with your deployment?

For document editing, I have had fairly good luck with OnlyOffice, although it is not without its issues. Others also recommend Collabora, which plays well with NextCloud and LibreOffice.