You don’t need to make politics your identity to be political, you just need to participate in politics. The main way to participate is to vote in elections, the rest helps but is unnecessary to be politically active.

node-media-server is what I use, it does the job well. I haven’t tried the recording bit, I just stream my desktop to my buddies sometimes. I had to modify the version I was using because the authentication didn’t work well with OBS. This was a while ago and development seems to be semi-active but I have no idea where it’s at.

I was told to steam my eggs at some point because the temp of the water won’t drop from the cold eggs. They’ve always peeled well cooking them this way.

Nothing, amazon is a leech. Don’t use amazon.

Centralization is a weakness. These services can be targeted by governments that want to limit communication. Free speech is a commodity, and servers host this free speech. If a hostile organization, such as a government, targets a channel of free speech such as those hosted on a platform that makes it easy to setup a mastodon instance, this become an easy target that will affect a large portion of users. If you are serious about freedom, you have the freedom to self-host your own platforms.

Edit: I realize my post doesn’t answer the question proposed, but it’s more of an argument against such services. I would argue self-hosting doesn’t rely on paying third-parties to host your software, but I guess this is in the eye of the hoster.

That’s why I treat it like a Chuck E. Cheese ticket machine and use about 50 tiles a wipe.

I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

This one was huge for me. OpenVPN is pretty heavy with CPU overhead, where as wireguard is almost free. I was getting throttled due to the overhead of OpenVPN and roasting the CPU on my Netgear R6350 (it’s what I had lying around). With wireguard I get nearly the same speeds as without a VPN and my loads are very reasonable.

Also with weaker routers like mine, be wary of trying to use QoS, this will probably not help network congestion and instead become a bottleneck (like it did for me). This is where a beefy dedicated router really shines.