Should be fine, just don't cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you're using something like smartctl you'll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.

I've done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you're on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.

is there anything you would recommend?

You'd need to donate via whatever means they accept donations, it's not something you get to choose yourself. Unless you meant that you are going to keep contacting FOSS projects to ask them to set up new donation methods?

Personally I donate via crypto or other means that they allow donations via credit card (Liberapay / Ko-Fi work well IMO) . No Paypal/Venmo since I can't use those services - some FOSS projects I don't donate at all if they only accept Paypal.

however I can still seed the torrent how is that possible?

Yes you can still seed as well as download. But you are limited and can only upload and download torrent data in swarms that contain peers that are themselves fully connectable (port forwarded).

So say you join a torrent swarm that only contains peers just like you (firewalled, no ports forwarded) then no one will transfer any torrent data with each other. Everyone is stuck waiting for a fully connectable (port forwarded) peer to join that swarm.

It's not, whatever you're looking at is just some site re-using the name.

Fastmail is great but it's a totally different market /use case, you wouldn't go with them if you're privacy oriented. They're better than Google in that sense but you'd go with Proton if you're looking for privacy features.

Also keep in mind Fastmail is based in Australia and their government tends to be anti-privacy with the laws that get passed there.

Same here.

Interestingly back when myself & others were moderating subs on Reddit, & we locked the subs during the protests, the majority of PMs us mods would receive were from randoms that found a link via Google or wherever & were trying to view the post. It did make me wonder how often people browse Reddit just because they stumbled into a link via Google or whatever search engine.

I can't see how Reddit would survive without the big search engines, without those random visitors the ad revenue would plummet.

I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.

Currently would not be possible. Jellyfin does not have the sort of centralized accounts/logins that Plex does e.g. you're not asking Jellyfin devs for permission to log into your own server. That's just a Plex thing.

If you're asking could they add that "feature" in the future? Highly unlikely but I guess anything is possible. Were that to happen most likely the code would get forked into a new project.

PS - Jellyfin itself is a fork from Emby back when those devs decided to close their source. Myself & tons of other people dropped Emby at that point & migrated to Jellyfin. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/about/

Not anymore

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/

Banning piracy? Like the mere encouragement or?

Just the mere encouragement & discussion, yes. The banned communities do not allow direct links to pirated content (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a rule forbidding that).

It's strange to see people saying there was some sort of legit reasoning, the lemmy.world admins did not receive any sort of legal DMCA/NTD request or anything of the sort. They were simply trolled hard by a brand new account from lemm.ee asking to defederate from "piracy" communities and lemmy.world admins took the bait. See the post yourself https://lemmy.world/post/3175920

Incidentally that same user has created troll accounts at other instances & have been getting themselves banned, they were already banned at the dbzer0 instance (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/1956277) so it looks like it was simple retaliation to attempt to trick other instances into defederating/blocking them.

Lemmy world is turning into Reddit v2

Not really, even Reddit still has piracy related subreddits (at least for now).

!mediashare@lemmy.world
!plexshares@lemmy.world
!plexshares@kbin.social

No according to admin, see the comment thread in the other post

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/399136