I've found that self-hosrinf my own instance has been a very good way of keeping the number of bits, spammers and people that like to take things to the extremes at a nice and consistent 0.
Sure, self hosting your own instance isn't for everyone but it's definitely doable and I'm satisfied with my experiences so far.
I recall reading a while ago about some OF content creators being upset that their stuff was being leaked to some scraper sites. Coomer.su was one of the ones mentioned in the story I was reading.
As to how much content is there and whether or not it's real, I couldn't say, but you've triggered one of those "I'm sure I read about this site a while ago" moments.
After a quick check of their site I see there's even what looks like a very well documented API, so you could even write a script that would let you scrape a creator's content from there if you were so inclined/had access to an AI tool for writing code.
In a previous role our QA team went from 5 to 2 due to this sort of thing happening. one person chose to offer his resignation rather than get sacked, another returned whilst looking for other work (which he found fairly easily as he was really good) and the 3rd guy is still there in post. Interestingly though the guy they were bitching about was fairly universally disliked and this made life even harder for him which I thought was somewhat unfair on him as it wasn't him who was at fault in this instance, he was just an arse.
I'm quite happy with audiobookshelf. Sometimes I'm in the mood to listen to a book, sometimes I fancy a podcast and audiobookshelf let's me do both with little fuss. (and it has oidc support for authentication which means I now authenticate with my single sign on solution)
That's likely true.
The first I heard of Pangolin was in a conversation that followed on from one about head/tailscale and I accept that I may have jumped to a conclusion. I am certain I've seen people talking about using it as a reverse proxy tool. Just found a blog post on the tailscale site talking about how to do it and they're using tailscale and caddy, rather than everything being handled by tailscale alone, so I'll accept that I'm wrong on this one. https://tailscale.com/blog/last-reverse-proxy-you-need
I've seen lots of talk about headscale, an open source tailscale which allows you to create your own tailnet and I'm sure I've seen people talking about using tailscale as a reverse proxy tool, but it's not something I've explored in detail.
Pangolin is somewhat higher on my list of things to explore than headscale though.
If you're looking for a reverse proxy caddy and Traefik are also widely used.
With all of these solutions though you're going to need to have some online provider somewhere handling DNS for you so that you can have your domains be pointed to your IP address.
I'll throw another recommendation behind Karakeep. The fact I can share a page fromy mobile browser or use a browser extension on a laptop/desktop is excellent.
Another great thing for me is the oidc support so I can log in without passwords and rely on my Pocket ID instance and log in using a passkey. (Authelia, Authentic, Keycloak and similar identity providers would work too)
I've been using matrix for quite a while now and I'm very happy with it.
The thing to be aware of though is that it takes quite a bit of work to get started, but once you've got it up and running it doesn't need much coddling. It's got video calling built into it now and can be entirely web based if you want it to be. I have all of my signal, WhatsApp and SMS messages being brodged over through it which is handy. I've also got a discord bridge set up which will bring all DMs and let's me bridge any of the servers I want to bring over.
it's been my one app for communicating with anyone that wants to talk to me on any IM platform I use, as well as any of the federated rooms and spaces I want to access from other home servers I want to work with.
Edit: I also recently added authentication via oidc which was great as now I don't need to worry about passwords as I just authenticate with passkeys on most of my self hosted services.
Oh, thanks for getting back with the overview. I appreciate it and will shortly be doing the swipe to mark as read once I find the option.
Mark as read on scroll will be great when that comes out too as that'll work nicely for me.
I'm a fellow mbin convert myself. When the great exodus happened, I set up a Lemmy instance, but I took a 4 month break from it for reasons I don't recall. When I tried to spin that instance back up it wouldn't pull in new posts and didn't support oidc, but I saw that mbin did, so I switched to that and was pretty happy with its look and feel.
Writing this message on the interstellar app just now. My only minor gripe is that there's no way to mark something as read with a single tap that I've found. (Got to long press and mark as read, but I'll accept that I may have missed something)
UK Gov has already said they have no plans to change consumer law, so I suspect that this will have the same result as all other petitions that the government wasn't already planning to and nothing will come of it. There may be a token debate if it hits the 100k signatures but again, nothing is likely to come from it.