My homelab is a learning tool that became useful enough to keep some things alive. It started with a raspperry pi and docker and has evolved to multiple systems with backups and some decently complex networking.

Ive always seen a “homelab” as different from a “home server”. Homelabs are meant to be fucked up as you learn things. Have a home lab long enough and you end up with a test lab and production environment.

The fact that this is not already happening sucks. Why wait

Matrix is what I moved to. To make transition easier for my core friends I wrote a guide with step by step instructions and pre-made a replica of our discord server. I got probably 70% of them to come over.

The real hit was large communities. For roughly a month I came in daily letting my communities know about what was happening and that I was gonna switch so if people wanted to find me here is where they could find me. I got 3 kinds of replies:

1. The nihilistic “I’ll never escape it, everyone already has my information, why fight it”
2. (In reference to the ID verification) “I’m not American so I don’t care if people have my ID because my country doesn’t have the problems America has”
3. “Moving is too hard and I use one specific feature the other apps don’t have and my friends are here so I’ll move when they move”

Moving to the new platform, giving a grace period to friends, and then moving and cutting contact with the platform had the highest success rate. People that want to talk with you will move, even if it’s just to only talk with you. But the hardest thing is accepting that some people just don’t care about their privacy and want the easy to use features enough that they are willing to lose contact with you.

My coworkers use Claude like an actual brain subscription, and I have started to write off everything they say as if it came straight from the AI. They have gained so much unearned confidence about shit they have no idea about, and have even argued with the development team about it.

I got into an argument about how in band and out of band DTMF work with one of them for a solid half hour before they finally admitted they didn’t actually know but were going off what claude said.

I wanted to punch them for wasting everyone’s time. If you don’t understand stop answering definitively like you’re the expert.

Some customers have switched to using AI emails too. Customers that used to ask extremely low level questions will now submit a 2 page long email with action items and explinations about why our product does X, Y, Z, and I have to read it twice to figure out their problem isn’t even in the action items because the AI hyper focused on the wrong thing.

Like ok thanks you dumped the entire app log into Claude and asked it “why no work” and Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.

If I see a restraunt that has all AI images of their food I automatically assume it’s a ghost kitchen and refuse to buy from it. Ill take a low quality phone cam pic of the food over AI because at least I know what I’m getting and know it’s real.

I vastly prefer it to calibre web personally, but it’s all up to personal preference. Kavita has a pretty extensive user guide too

I use calibre to label books by series. I don’t think I did anything crazy with the folder structure outside of putting comics, manga, and books in separate directories.

I have one media directory with books / manga / comics in separate subdirectories. I process metadata with calibre or other tools as needed, and point Kavita at my books directory and tell it to scan. Kavita should automatically group books of the same series together provided the series name is exact. (eg: “The adventures of Bob” vs “adventures of Bob, The” would be seen as different series. Kavita should also group the libraries together by directory, so I have 3 libraries, books, manga, and comics.

You do need to make sure books are all in the correct formats. I batch convert everything to epub and limit Kavita to only show epubs to avoid duplicates.

The upside to all this is that Kavita comes with a cleaner interface imho, opds is easier to set up, and I’ve had less issues with it. Also users can set their own reading lists and collections if you are setting this up for other users.

For books: mam (manually now that readarr died) -> calibre -> Kavita

If it’s a manga or comic, bypass calibre, straight to Kavita + komf for metadata / covers.

I literally use matrix voice for my d&d group every week lol, just join a server that has voice

Only thing I dislike is the lack of software based noise cancelling is a bit awkward but very managable

It’s not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how “the free lunch is over” now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.

Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It’s the home consumer world that doesn’t use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.

Unless you’re like me and the websites you use for work require it and don’t work in literally any other browser (I have tried everything)