I've been a user of Mullvad for a while and love there stance on privacy. I really like how they have stayed focused. But recently I feel like there speeds have gotten way worse.

For example I may be able to get 150ish up and down without a VPN but once I add Mullvad it gets way slower. Still very useable for most tasks but limiting when I have bigger downloads. This is across several different networks to eliminate it just being an individual network problem.

Has anyone else been experiencing this?

I've been wondering about how well a lot of American states could function if they where fully independent states. I'm not thinking every state would be it's own country but states banding together and becoming there own countries. An example of this California, Oregon, and Washington.

I'm thinking that kind of like the Fediverse it is easier to manage and do more the people on a smaller scale.

What do others think of this?

I've been wodnering how regulations about not killing games deals with compaines running multi-player servers?

For single player games or games with single player modes it seems easier to implement.

So I always here about on how Google Android and IOS those companies can see all your notifications. This is because to show a notification it calls an API.

Is there any technical reason that it has to send your notification data to Google and Apple or is it just to get more data on you?

I have some moeny set aside for donating to some open source projects. I was looking for some advice for the best way to determine the need of projects. With only a limited amount of money.

Also would it be better to give to a lot of things and a small amount of money or a large amount of money to a few.

Right now I was thinking of donating to the Lemmy intance I am on and Mastadon instance.

I already use Tuta as my email provider. I already have a domain I can use with it (bought privately). What privacy implemcations does it come with.

The main reason is because I would like to be able to keep the same email address for longer and not have to change when/if I change providers.

I'm looking into to building a small media server. I will be th only user of it. So I don't need the ability to do simultaneous streams. I am planning on running Jellyfin.

Sense I am on a more limited budget I was thinking and older desktop and transcoding my files (on my powerful desktop) to be best supported and play smoothly.

Are there any specific recommendations you guys have for hardware I should keep a look out for that's cheaper or other recommendations for cheap hardware?