Squid VS Discourse

> But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through ...

On a technical point, you might be able to get away with just using Squid for the proxy, with pretty much default settings.

http://www.squid-cache.org

I used to use that years ago (not with Netflix though) running from a data centre, using an ssh (autossh) tunnel to reach it securely.

Worked pretty well, aside from the extra latency due to the packets having to go an extra half way around the world. ;)

I recommend trying a transparent proxy like Squid. There are many analytics tools for Squid logs. Squid can generate TLS certificates on the fly to inspect secure websites but you'll have to generate and install a CA certificate and key into Squid. You'll also have to import the CA certificate on any machine accessing the internet through the Squid proxy. Squid has the added bonus of caching content to speed up web browsing and reduce data usage.

I “invented” IPFS when I though “wouldn’t it be nice if we could combine Squid-Cache with BackupPC

A couple of dedicated server-side resource caching solutions have emerged over the years: Memcached, Varnish, Squid, etc. Other solutions are less focused on web resource caching and more generic, e.g., Redis or Hazelcast.

Web caching (more techical, probably not useful) there squid-cache

Also, the fact it is distributed by HTTP allow companies (and ISPs) to cache content in Squid servers (http://www.squid-cache.org/). And this is quite a feature!

If your router is compatible with custom firmware (Tomato or DD-WRT) you can flash it and use the logging features of those platforms. Otherwise no there isn't really an "app or software" that can do this, you need a piece of hardware that sits between the LAN devices and the internet connection. That can be a full-fledged computer, if you're willing to use it as firewall or router (pfSense), DNS server (PowerDNS) or proxy server (Squid).

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.