u/Infinite-Win-3949

Hey everyone, thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and share your thoughts!
I’ve been using several third-party VPN providers, but I noticed in their dashboards that they’re logging things like my traffic, domains visited, and probably other resolution data I’m not even aware of. I’d rather keep as much control over my own privacy as possible.
I have my own VPS and I’m comfortable with Linux, but I’ve never set up a self-hosted VPN before (WireGuard, OpenVPN, etc.). A few questions:
1.How difficult is it to actually set one up from scratch?

2.Does it require ongoing maintenance (updates, monitoring, renewing certs, etc.), or is it mostly “set and forget”?

3.How does stability/reliability compare to commercial VPN providers, things like uptime, IP reputation for streaming/geo-unblocking, DDoS exposure, etc.?

4.Realistically, how should I weigh privacy/control against the extra operational burden of running my own?

Would really appreciate input from anyone who’s made the switch from commercial VPNs to self-hosted. Thanks!

Hey all, looking for some advice here. My customer base has grown to a decent size now, and I’ve been collecting emails through my signup form for a while, but I’ve actually never sent a single marketing/update email to them yet, kind of embarrassing, I know 😅

Now I’m finally ready to start doing real email marketing, and I’m stuck on a decision: should I build my own email sending system, or just go with an established third-party ESP (like Mailchimp, SendGrid, etc.)?

Part of me wants to self-host, mainly because I like the idea of owning all my data and not being dependent on (or losing data to) a third party. But I have a feeling self-hosting email at this stage could open up a can of worms deliverability, IP reputation, spam filters, etc.

For someone still early-ish in scaling email ops, what would you recommend? What are the real tradeoffs between building it myself vs just using a third-party platform for now? Would love to hear from people who’ve been through this decision.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve got a bunch of active group chats and want to visualize how much each group talks per day, like a GitHub-style calendar heatmap.

I know you can export chats as .txt and parse them with Python, but doing that manually for every group feels like a pain, especially if I want it to stay up to date.

Anyone found a good workflow for this? Looking for:
1.Scripts/tools you use to parse exported chats
2. Any way to keep the data updated without re-exporting constantly
3. Existing dashboards/visualizers worth checking out

Just trying to understand my own chat habits, not after anything I can’t already see in the groups. Thanks!

I’m not very familiar with TTS and want to add voiceovers to videos using text-to-speech. What are people generally using these days? Curious about the differences between open-source and paid options, quality, ease of setup, cost, etc. Any recommendations for a beginner would be appreciated!

Hi all, I’d like to build a simple portable router using hardware instead of software (to avoid things like DNS leaks). Could anyone recommend which ESP32 module and libraries would work well for this? Thanks so much in advance!

Washington coords: 38.901387, -77.005148

I see Patreon has a public API but rarely hear people mention actually using it. Anyone here integrated it in a real project? How’s the stability, rate limits, and docs quality? Trying to decide if it’s worth building on.