I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.

Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.

I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.

Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.

Currently about 70TB capacity.

My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

I’ve not looked into anything yet… I’m reaching that age where I’ve just become closer to 50 than 40… and I find myself starting to become reluctant to dive in and learn a whole new OS after decades of trying to learn everything.

I started buying games on steam, way, way back in the 2000’s… long before any of the enshitification began… and you’re not allowed to own anything any more… I switched to GOG for buying games, as I do own them and can download and keep them for life… But after being converted away from… erm… acquiring games via alternative methods… I’m looking to acquire them again… even games that I bought and paid for simply for the hassle free experience of not needing to be online 24/7 and having DRM degrade the performance.

Have you tried using grayjay for youtube access without the tracking and data harvesting?

As for office software, libreoffice is something I’ve been using for ages now, I’m stuck on windows 10 for the moment… really need to dive into some form of linux… thinking proton as I do game a fair bit.

I’ve currently got a pixel 6 pro phone, and a HMD T21 tabelt… would really like to install lineage OS on both if possible… don’t know where to start. I used to have a wileyfox phone 10yrs ago, which used cyanogen OS… which I do believe forked into lineage OS. So I know how good the degoogle aspect was back then, plus the increased security measures built in.

I block as much as I can across all devices, and do my best to render what they can collect worthless… I use a VPN 24/7, block all scripts, trackers and cookies, sandbox sites in their own containers… quit facebook 13yrs ago… use mastodon, lemmy, signal & telegram only… have to suffer a whatsapp account for family only. Proton mail linked to an @duck.com email… so I never get emails sent to gmail, I use an old outlook email alias for spam signups and only check it if I need to confirm an email addy.

I’ve turned of everything I can with my phone, from location to anything to do with ai… I refuse to buy ‘smart’ devices that can be bricked or updated remotely from some company servers, or forced to connect to them to simply work… I own what I buy, so never buy digital goods (aside from some games from Steam/GOG) and only pay for Netflix streaming service… maybe I should roam the 7 seas for stuff too.

I’m thinking about building a pi-hole and setting up home assistant to eliminate the 2 internet connected devices in my home whjich is the thermostat for my heating and the solar/battery system which I use to monitor the data from the house.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.