Taler is centralized and has poor privacy protections

This is non-sense. It’s not centralized at all and the privacy protections are excellent, just designed to different specs (privacy for buyers, but not sellers).

This is not a new argument, but the author is a bit confused with the terms. Usually it is phrased as “social network” Vs. “social media”.

Wero is a trap at best or more likely a figleaf that is meant to fail.

EU private banks much prefer the status quo over systems like the Brazilian PIX taking over the digital payment systems.

So when the EU central bank started looking into a sovereign alternative to Visa/Mastercard etc. the private banks scrambled to put together Wero to delay and maybe prevent the central bank from coming up with a system like PIX.

Sadly GNU Taler was never really an option for these banks, as it is an open standard and thus even if they supported it, the central bank could still plug into it with their own system and thus they would be forced to compete with that.

https://video.hardlimit.com/c/opensource_gaming/videos

Wouldn’t they especially want a working communication channel in case there is an extended power outage?

As a start it might be better to rent a VPS or so with a service that does backups etc for you. It will be hard to convince people to use it, and issues like dataloss or longer downtimes will kill it for sure.

Also, a large rack server is total overkill for what you want with a few hundred members at most.

ASrock has a few similar mini-itx boards with passive cooled CPUs soldered on, but they are not nearly as fully featured as what some of the Chinese brands sell.

Alibaba and the like, although I think there are also resellers on Amazon etc.

There are some nice NAS focussed mini-itx boards with integrated CPU and cooling (usually Intel N150 or similar) that fit well into small media PC cases.

That is a bit bigger than a NUC, but you can fit hard drives easily and these mainboards usually have a lot of extension ports and multiple on board m2 slots for NVMe discs.

Cloudflare tunnel error 🤦

With Podman and Quadlets you can use the same command to check on containers as well. The Systemd integration of Podman is pretty neat.

No, Luanti is a platform for Minecraft like games, like a place to find lots of user generated games and such, I guess Roblox is a bit similar to that (I never tried Roblox, so I am guessing). It is also fairly easy to make your own games with it.

There are however games for Luanti that are very similar to Minecraft such as Voxelibre and Minecloina.

While it isn’t easy for Matrix, running an quivalent XMPP server on Tor, I2P or similar is fairly well documented, and there are multiple such servers accessible both on the clearnet and Tor.

Many XMPP clients also have built in Tor proxy settings.

I don’t get why people continue to recommend Minecraft when there is the much better open-source Luanti project: https://www.luanti.org/

Don’t look online, ask friends and family if someone has an old laptop you can get for free. Very likely someone does, especially if you are ok with a bad battery and/or a broken screen.

A RPi3 can work, but it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86.

Typically a video-chat server does no transcoding so this isn’t a major issue. But for hosting a Peertube or Owncast server it would.

The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.

Bitcoin and Ethereum only have liquidity in the market because scammers use it for their pig butchering etc. scams. And all the major exchanges are complicit in that. Many Banks are scammy, yes, but not that scammy by a long shot. Sorry to burst your bubble 🤷

https://movim.eu/ can do that AFAIK, but for now the A/V calls don’t go through an SFU distribution server (coming soonish), so it will not scale to many participants. But if you want to only stream to a few people (like max. 5 or so, depends a bit on your and their internet speed) it should work.

If 99.9% of PCs were solely made to steal your credit card info, then yes.