I’m in the same situation.
Fortunately there’s a million companies that offer VPS with a static IP address for only few bucks a month. I set one up to run a wireguard VPN server which all my devices and home servers connect to as clients. I also configured everything to use a split tunnel to save bandwidth.
It’s an added layer of security too.
Even if there were no bots and it was only “real” content from Threads … is that the sort of content we want to have Lemmy flooded with?
I use gImageReader + Tesseract, but that probably doesn’t meet your criteria. Unfortunately OCR is very rarely perfect unless the input is perfectly clear and with a “OCR friendly” font/formatting. There are “AI powered” OCR out there, but I can’t speak to how well they work and I don’t know of any free ones.
The OCR struggles with some PDFs for whatever reasons: font, formatting, etc.
There are 3rd party PDF OCR websites/programs that work better. If I’m having issues I run it through one of those first.
I’ve given up on trying to find certain books in sane formats. Thankfully Calibre is really good at converting PDFs to actual ebook formats.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes I have to do a little semi-automated cleanup – but it works.
Defense in depth – maybe I’m paranoid, but just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean an extra layer of security isn’t advantageous. Particularly when I already have a VPN, so there’s little reason not to use it.
Plus, my logs are easily checked as a side effect.
I don’t get why people leave interfaces the public doesn’t need access to open to the public – especially SSH.
Use a VPN if you need access to those interfaces from the “outside”. They’re stupidly easy to set up these days, particularly with Wireguard.
I was working with a buddy on a “startup” that was more of a hobby than anything (and didn’t go anywhere). The early prototypes were controlled by Arduino and Pis early on – ease of software development was key as we experimented with and dialed in the hardware. The later prototypes used an ESP32 though, because we’re aren’t idiots.
I’m a hobbyist at best: it kills me that there are well paid “professional embedded software engineers” out there that can’t work with actual embedded hardware. All I could think of was this article on electrical engineers that can’t solder. The complete lack of real world, hands on experience with the hardware blows my mind.
Accept the instance owners will be forced to turn to shittier methods of income, like ads.
Normally when you’re on a VPN all the network traffic to and from your device is going through the connection to the VPN server, e.g. browsing the internet, online games, etc. It can cause issues with other online services and uses bandwidth (cheap as it is) many VPS provider charges for.
A split tunnel tells the VPN client to only send certain traffic through the tunnel. My wireguard setup assigns IP addresses for the VPN interfaces in the subnet 192.168.2.x, so only traffic addressed to IPs on that subnet get sent through the tunnel. In wireguard it’s a single line in the config file: