Three ad blockers? One of them is fake and serving you ads. Or is allowing ads through because they are getting kickbacks. Or one of your other add-ons is serving that crap. Purge all that shit and start over.

Who the hell sees ads? If you choose to let your browser run them, well, what do you want?

Eh, then if your online ID is compromised you’re in trouble. Can’t just burn it and start over.

I have one 12 TB and two 14 internal hard drives. I also have 6 external drives (two 12 TB, four 14 TB) for 2x redundant backups. All my new stuff and dynamic documents are stored on the 12 TB drive (so that I only have to update the backups for that drive frequently). When it gets fullish I migrate content over to the storage drives and update those backups. I’ve been doing this maybe twice a year.

I also have my dynamic files, photos, docs etc, set to auto backup twice daily to a remote backup.

I only delete content to replace with higher quality.

I haven’t bothered with any sort of raid in nearly two decades. You need proper backups regardless so what’s the point? If I have to run half my Plex library off a USB backup drive for a week while a new drive runs badsector and syncs up… who cares? Merging the drives as a JBOB is nifty and all, but adds complexity across the board without meaningful gain.

You want a disgusting AI generated content mess? Because that’s how you get a disgusting AI generated content mess.

While I’m generally opposed to defederation as a general rule, I’m also old enough to have suffered through Microsoft’s Embrace Extend Extinguish paradigm. Never again. Absolutely no federation with megacorp instances.

I prefer 265 for efficiency BUT there’s a certain nostalgic warmth with 264 over-compressed fuzz. Same deal as with vinyl records. It was such an improvement on xvid back in the day…

A better option might be pirating over i2p but I have not tried that yet.

I expect most of us are here for the chill vibe. That should be reflected in the outcomes at the agora. Assuming it’s local only.

I’d back a patreon supporting the instance. No problem.

How well does i2p mesh with private trackers? Would they be able to track up/down ratios?

Well, in their case they are looking for proof that the applicant is a responsible torrenter. Typically what is accepted is screenshots showing one’s private user page at other reputable private torrent sites showing upload-to-download ratio, whether they had any warnings etc. The major sites have highly experienced mod teams with accounts at a huge range of sites and can often cross reference the information in the screenshots if they care enough to.

I wonder if we’ll get to something resembling the system used by private BitTorrent trackers. Invites and open registration periods where interviews or “proofs” of being a good internet user are required.