Its always code forges and wikis that are effected by this because the scrapers spider down into every commit or edit in your entire history, then come back the next day and check every “page” again to see if any changed. Consider just blocking pages that are commit history at your reverse proxy.

I do exactly this, but it doesn’t protect your privacy. That one IP address is literally tied to your credit card number and you are the only person using it.

They will only apply it to retail VPNs. You think capitalists play by the same rules?

Small scale version. I heard from some kids that they wanted to play Roblox at school. IT had blocked it on the Wifi. The kids advice to each other was “go on the play store, search VPN, and install whatever one is free.” - IT absolutely isn’t making those kids safer.

They are only interested in retail, anonymizing VPNs. If you spin up your own VPN you are still 1:1 linked to that IP address. If you use a work VPN, they fully track everything. The anonymizing ones that dont track users and share an IP between many users are a threat to mass surveilance.

Probably better to use them for their screen, firewalled off from everything except whatever is providing a dashboard or info display (e.g., homeassistant).

Your perspective aligns with a lot of self-hoisters who run things on rpi’s and such, but not the “home labbers”. Also, see the pubnix, tildeverse, smol web, indie web, and to some extent the retro computing communities. You are definitely not alone!

A device on your local lan is pretty accessible. Don’t open ports from the internet and be sure to back up important data. Something like homeassistant or pi-hole on a raspberry pi is very accessible. Remote access is where thing start getting tricky.

If you want to host something publicly, buy a $5 VPS and install a web server on it. Try hosting static websites. Don’t put anything sensitive on it and if something happens to it, you are out your 5 bucks for the month and learned a lesson.

Restic is great, and the de-duplication between snapshots is amazingly good. Same content in different files (e.g. tar files of linux systems) take very little space like magic). Backrest is a nice web frontend for it.

Note that you should use some retention features of your provider to manage the risk of ransomware deleting your backups.