Not sure if serious. Recession is almost certain, and the only fiscal “stimulus” that’s likely to come is tax cuts. Will probably turn into a depression. But even the Great Depression had a huge amount of fiscal stimulus and progressive reforms to help get out of it. Not to mention, the crashing of the economy appears to be purposeful:

Child labor is used all around the world still. Just have to loosen laws a bit and make people poor enough to accept low wages, then it will be (more) of a thing in the US too. Below-living wage is cheaper than automating for many tasks; doesn’t require the rich to risk as much capital either.

Some states are pretty authoritarian and stop cities from doing anything good. Some states have banned rank-choice voting. But yeah, where this is possible, it’s definitely a path forward.

Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.

The page uses canvas, and Librewolf blocks some canvas functionality by default for privacy reasons. You should see a little icon to the left of the url that you can click to allow the site to run correctly.

If you’re running a lot of stuff on the same server, I agree with others that you’d want to use containers or VMs to avoid possible dependency hell. I prefer containers so I don’t have multiple OSs using RAM. I’ve never used Proxmox, but if I understand correctly, it’s an OS specifically built for running containers and VMs more easily, so I’m guessing that’d be a good choice. I personally just use Ubuntu LTS or Debian, Docker, and SSH to administer my servers, because that’s what I’m familiar with.

A cheap used Desktop PC off Craigslist or whatever should be fine. Desktops are more upgradable and configurable. You’d want to make sure the CPU and Mobo support however much RAM you’d want. Ext4 is fine if using a single disk; ZFS for multiple disks with redundancy. Preferably, a smallish SSD for the OS disk, but not required.

*arr stack for pirating: https://wiki.servarr.com/

Jellyfin for serving media. You may want something like the cheapest Intel Arc GPU for transcoding if you’re going to serve HDR video to low-spec devices.

Nextcloud for basic file sharing. NFS for high performance file sharing with Linux machines, if needed. Syncthing for syncing files if you need that.

Immich for something similar to Google Photos, if needed.

I recently went back to pirating and transferring music to my phone like it was an iPod, lol. VLC is a good player (and works with Android Auto), and Strawberry is good on Linux for listening and library management. The SoulSeek network has a lot of hard to find stuff in flac (I use the Nicotine+ client).