Encryption in transit is pretty much solved these days with TLS, what OP wants is E2E - encryption from sender to recipient with no intermediate parties having an idea about contents of the message. Problem with E2E is inconvenience: emails are inaccessible without private keys and key management is pain. Users don't want additional headache of managing their keys between bajillion of devices where they might use emails

You'd need to put a bit more thought into that, at least to start thinking in more detailed terms than "US" and "outside".
Countries, visa types, schools for your kid, work opportunities for your wife, local language, acceptance of your identity (believe me, majority of places in the world are much worse in that regard than Trump could ever be), etc, etc....

What I can promise you is that money situation will be worse. Uprooting yourself and moving somewhere is a costly endeavor (did that 2 times, it's not fun), and besides that US is the best country to earn money out there, it's much harder to cover necessities and have disposable income pretty much anywhere else.

Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd.

There's much more effort involved to produce modern GPU now. Either way, if NVidia would be truly greedy, they'd close gaming gpu business right away and would produce only AI accelerators. You can take same 4070, add $200 worth of GDDR chips to the layout and sell this for $15k minimum, shit would be on backorder.

fun fact - lately russian govt started testing out protocol blocking (through dpi), several days ago there were reports of xmpp blocked for everything but jabber.ru.

warrant was likely received to bust some cybercrime org, jabber is pretty popular in ex-ussr in these circles, the usual question is what happened with this mitm channel after.

it's like this to eliminate competition, any alternative has to fund marketing costs + unsustainable pricing, while Spotify will be running their ponzi scheme, effectively leveraging their market position.

Dubai is much cheaper

how do you bump it into something enough to break the latch without messing up bumper, number plate and bonnet? all of it looks intact

Lemmy is not truly distributed at this point, there are few well-known instances which are bearing the load and the rest is just sipping stuff through activitypub subscriptions.
If this thing will become even remotely popular with current architecture they have to follow the same path donations -> commercial or die. Serving a lot of users costs money, serving media content costs even more money. It's not a problem at the moment, but it will be.

ActivityPub is not a magic bullet, it's just a spec on how servers talk to each other. To truly involve each and every server in sharing the workload there's a need in something on top of that, or even better - replacing that since w/o active participation of client apps in load balancing it'll be the same reverse proxy shit in the end.

C#

eh... those are fundamentally different, C is not object-oriented so OOD part goes straight out of the window. The only thing similar about them is syntax to some degree (which is really irrelevant), approach is completely different.

It's not even about gui.
If you want to self host you get yourself a pile of software of community-level quality (i.e "it works good until it doesn't" is the best outcome) you need to care about. This means constantly being involved - updating, maintaining, learning something, etc, and honestly it's time-consuming even for experienced sysadmins.

I'm not interested in their app at all since it's going to run as headless docker gateway for qbittorrent/radarr/sonarr/other shit anyway, but - it seems like they support proper NAT-PMP which is massive.
https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding-manual-setup/

Wow wtf I didn’t know this.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
They already disabled the possibility to add new port forwards and will remove any existing ones completely on 1st of July.