I’ve been slowly setting up my own services locally, and one of the issues I quickly ran into was simple: what’s the point of running the uptime monitor in the same machine? Granted, it still serves is purposes, but…

So, if you do find a way to get something going, I think it’d be really cool. My biggest concern would be, though, on how to ensure you don’t accidentally build a DDoS network instead. A though issue I have no idea how to solve, but which should be solvable!

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

I missed not having to think about Samba to share a drive with a Windows machine.

On the other hand, I was rightly pointed to better alternatives for my use-case, so perhaps the learning will make the pain worth it?

Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.

Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don’t see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.

* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that’s a social issue, not a technological issue.