pia is terrible for privacies for government (five eyes country host), but its a fine budget option for privacy against business (piracy).

its an okay vpn as long as you are fully aware on what youre paying for

its actually the sole reason why i ended up paying for plex myself. its not because on ME that i ended up using plex, its moreso everyone else that I want to give my server access to with the least amount of hurdles that made me ultimately go that route.

not liking something enough that you will on bias remove things. In this case, it was anime, but it could basically be applied to any viewpoints said admin would have then if they were that quick to react to just anime. It’s the action and how it was handled and less the topic.

im not doubting the possibility, but not to even provide evidence to the servers admins is a red flag on pushing the ml dev/admins agendas without being transparent about it.

without a level of transparency, the same reason can be used to unjustfully ban anything.

ani social was anime related, but the admins banned it because they dont really like anime and just tag reasons for censorship as loli, without evidence of it. I dont even actively contribute to the anime community, but was the driving reason why i moved from ml to zip. didnt want to have to deal with unsubstantial censorship with an actual valid reason.

i wouldnt say im an expert at it as ive only had my media server for a month now, but how i approached making it user friendly was buying a domain name, and using a cloudflare tunnel to link your ip addresses/port to a subdomain.domain combination.

e.g i have overseer accessible by overseerr.domainname.extention and have it linked to the servers ipadress and port number. if i wanted to add another one, i would for example add a new subdomain and do the same (e.g plex.domainname.extention and point it to the correct ip/port combo)

although this has the cost of owning a domain, it doesnt require you to open a port so its better for security reasons

buying tech products by brand allows brands to sell you a shitty product at premium price points. companies will always shit out bad eggs at times, and its your job to know which product line are bad and not let brand loyalty bypass that.

at the bare minimum, if you are buying by brand, buy it solely based on customer support, as some companies are significantly better at that than others, which is an objective trait.

its more so the convenience factor. this also doesnt consider the hard drive mounting mechanism that youd spend time on as well, which limits case choice. with an m.2 drive, the drive can be installed outside of the case trivially

sata would be used more for secondary storage or for systems setup as network attached storage. the nvme m. 2 formfactor for ssds is more convenient for users as its both smaller and does not require the user to wire 2 cables to use it.