Yeah that video essay is such a wild ride. I'm on the spectrum and I absolutely understand the emotional ties one can have to such esoteric hobbies, and how those emotions can twist relationships due to perceived slights and phantom insults.
Nobody hates Nerds like other Nerds.
Yes, however he toiled for a while on his own before release when he was still at university, that's the time period I'm referencing.
Well you'd start here
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/how-use-meshtastic/
You self host a comms server, i use matrix, and that forwards the message to you.
If you're directly tied to the SMS protocol you can setup a repeater here https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/an-off-grid-makeshift-cell-network/
Then it's meshtastic -> Matrix -> SMS gateway
Well Torvalds was only one guy for the first couple years.
Immich to an NFS share that's exposed to the nextcloud container is very seamless to the end user and can be setup in the external sources in the nextcloud web gui.
Well like any distro it's not just the desktop environment (Gnome) but follows an opinionated setup and design. There's bundled packages, design tweaks to the DE, config changes to packaged software, different default apps and repos for the base OS (Debian in this case) and other tweaks. Link below should explain this all in more depth.
Speak for yourself
Yup.
Buy any domain name, doesn't matter what. I pay 15 dollars a year for mine. https://gandi.net
https://mailu.io/2.0/ is pretty turnkey
https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver has a lot more customizability and you can chain together stuff like encryption, spam filtering, auto replies with an AI agent. However those are all other containers you'll have to add into your environment.
https://jzweig.com/blog/setup-your-own-email-server-with-docker/ Is a really simple how to
Whatever you do, pay close attention to your SPF, DKIM and DMARC
https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/dkim-dmarc-and-spf-setting-up-email-security/
Edit: OP asked for free, secure, and doesn't get taken down for inactivity. If you want to do that and pay as little as possible, with the most security, you'll have to self host. Otherwise you should pay for the service, or deal with the data brokers that offer free email. In capitalism, unfortunately, there is no free lunch.
You're currently posting in one...