RE: Silo. The books were good... the first was the best in my opinion and the quality didn't shift too far in the subsequent books, but Dust was definitely the weakest (and last) of the three. Still consistently good, but I did find myself a lot less invested by the end of Dust than I was by the end of Leviathan Falls.
TV series I haven't started Silo yet but it's definitely on my radar. The Expanse TV show was really good and I felt ended at just the right point in the story.
This is exactly the problem I also have with Marvel movies. Once you've raised the stakes so far it's impossible to go back without seeming less than your predecessors. It's why Iron Man worked so damned well as it was a pretty small, personal story... same for most of the early Avengers movies. Ever since Endgame it seems like everyone wants to either make it even bigger still (?!??) or challenge these people who have saved literally the entire universe with.. emotional trauma? I don't know... I've seriously lost interest.
Well, consider I've run my own mailserver on one of those domains since 2001 so I've had plenty of time to "grow" with it. I have no issues with GMail and the like but as I said my domain has been around a long time and so I may well be grandfathered in a lot.
Having said all that, even with my newest domain (less than a year old) I don't have any issues so long as I make sure to comply with all the caveats around ensuring my MX records are good, making sure my DMARC, SPF, DKIM and even PTR and reverse DNS records are all in place (the latter is one a LOT of people forget when self-hosting but reverse lookups are a big deal with mail). The amount of mail that my mail server spam-buckets from domains with only forward lookups and no reverse is astounding. But having said that it's a GREAT way to block spam.
Finally, mail on residential IP blocks or even a lot of cloud provider blocks are just plain not good for mail hosting. One of my MX hosts is on a Linode which gets blacklisted periodically in one of the less reputable blacklists, but it usually doesn't affect mail flow all that much. I do subscribe to services to monitor for blacklist listings and delistings for my IP's as well mostly to keep track but it's handy to know if there might be something wrong with your mailserver.
Mail hosting isn't for the faint of heart... but once it works it pretty much just works. My primary personal domain I haven't changed anything in a couple of years... and I've had no need to change much with the mail server itself. It comes out of the box with some nice secure settings and it's kinda nice to have two decades of mail I can refer back to on an IMAP server :)
No, that's what I'm using. Thankfully it works fine and I don't worry too much about security because I just leave it turned off until I need it. The "/droppy" url directs to it but if it's off then it just throws an error back.
Oh jeez... there's quite the list. I have a Ceph cluster of 3 nodes with 15x HDD's and 3 SSD's... on that cluster I run some VM's that in turn run a Docker swarm. All Ubuntu 22.04, all commodity hardware. Currently I'm running;
Then there's a whole host of ancillary services; BackupPC, Unifi controller container, piHole on a couple of Raspberry Pi's, ts-dnsserver for internal DNS management... probably a dozen other containers and tools I'm forgetting.
Oh yeah, and a Synology NAS as a backup target :)
You should be able to... you'll need to install GIT and then install Docker. Once you've done that you should be able to spin it up using the instructions.
Alternatively, since it runs as a "web app" on port 1301, you could easily spin it up on your server Linux PC as well under Docker, then just browse to that server on port 1301, authenticate and you should be all good. There's then an option to download all your data as a JSON :)
There is another aspect that you didn't get into; I am on a lot of subreddits where I attempt to help people with questions. r/zfs, r/ceph, r/homelab and r/datahoarder are ones I frequent among others where if people have questions I and others attempt to help them. This is neither a debate nor humour, and is one area where Lemmy still has a lot of catching up to do... not least of which because the specialized communities don't yet exist.
I haven't left Reddit yet... I'm still watching and waiting but it IS nice to have Lemmy and Tildes as alternatives (though I'm more digging Lemmy so far).
Thankfully I had the foresight to install Expanse a few months ago and it has been dutifully downloading my data all this time and puts it in a nice searchable GUI. Might be quicker than waiting for the download LOL
I agree, if you're watching anything from the Special Editions and onward. I mentioned this over on "the old site" in a conversation, but the Special Editions and their subsequent versions absolutely destroyed the pacing of the entire movie... particularly the first one.
I recently rewatched the "4K77" version of Star Wars and was blown away... I was enthralled as I don't remember being by Star Wars since I saw it as a kid on almost worn out VHS. The special edition additions and later modifications kill the pacing of the movie and add irrelevant details that don't need to be on screen... a prime example would be the Jabba scene in the original. It added nothing that hadn't already been implied in the Greedo scene and broke up the flow of the story of getting from the tavern to the Falcon... it felt unnecessary because it was.
Even a smaller detail; when the stormtroopers are examining the escape pod the scene flows brilliantly with the trooper finding the droid part... in the special and later editions it's preceded by a longer cut that shows off the CGI dewbacks... which was unnecessary as it was always implied with the trooper on a dewback in the background (even if it was static). It also just looks awkward in every subsequent edition and results in an extended scene that removes a good "story beat" in the same way that a poor drummer hitting a bass drum at the wrong time can throw off an entire song and make it sound like a cacophony.
Star Wars as originally released was a masterpiece of editing. Everything flowed, there was a symmetry and perfect timing to the story beats. That symmetry makes the flow predictable... nothing is "shocking" in Star Wars but everything works together and literally creates a far better movie than it has any right to be. The Special Editions completely screwed that up.