Depending on exactly what features you actually need in term of things like commenting, you might want to look into a static site generator. Something like hugo woud probably do what you need in terms of translating the markdown into a blog. It has the advantage that you can them host the pages on a normal web server, rather than running a blogging platform, giving you a much lighter weight server footprint, and a much smaller attack surface too.
I’ve found Hetzner to be reasonable for VPSs and even bare metal servers, especially if you keep an eye on their auctions.
Whether you’re hosting it all at home, all on a remote server, or some combination of the two, it’s worth taking the time to first learn some form of automation tooling, so that your setup is reproducible and you know exactly how everything is set up. From the first time you have to rebuild everything due to a hardware failure trashing your server, or a careless rm -rf, you’ll be glad of it.
Ansible is a good place to start as it’s pretty straighforward to get going, and your playbook can grow with your requirements. If you’re using a lot of containers, make sure you understand docker, and maybe consider Kubenetes, especially if you want to split your workload across servers.
I find that a dedicated RSS reader is a much better experience, as, especially when you’ve got a lot if feeds, organising them and keeping track of what you’ve read becomes quite important. If you take your eye off of a chat based system, you’re going to have so many unread messages it’ll be hard to keep up.
Flock has done its part in soaking up public anger at pervasive surveillance, and can now be left to fail. Companies like Axon will step in to the breach, be slightly less obviously awful, and receive much less public pushback.
This isn’t going away until the very governments that benefit from it pass laws against it. For there to be any chance of that happening there has to be even greater public pushback.
The employees of the AI companies will lose their jobs.
Spend the bailout money helping them instead. Maybe even make some sort of society wide safety net, so people don’t need to fear losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Let the companies sink or swim on their own merits.
Once again, they only understand when it affects them personally.
The cache usage being higher on a server than a laptop seems fairly likely as more disk accesses are occurring. When data is loaded from disk, the linux kernel will keep it in memory even after the original requester is done with it, on the principal that it might need it again. This is the cache you’re seeing. If the kernel detects high memory utilisation it will free cache pages before anything else, so you actually want to see near 100% memory utilisation all the time, as it means fewer accesses to disk.
The swap usage is harder to diagnose without more detailed diagnostic work, but you can see from the graph you posted that, even what swap is being used, you have a little free memory. This may well be the kernel preemptively moving little used memory pages to the swap cache so tgat they can be evicted from memory quickly if needed. You could investigate thus by adjusting the ‘swapiness’ value closer to 0, to see if that delays the swap usage and reduces the peak.
Seeing high cache and buffer numbers is usually a good sign, as it means the system is making full use of the memory you have. It’ll automatically deallocate it if something actually needs the memory, but until then it’s using it to store data you might need.
Swap’s a funny one, and whilst you can tune it to an astonishing degree, the decisions the kernel makes aren’t always what you’d want. With this little actual memory usage, compared to the installed RAM, you might be able to run without swap at all, unless you want something like hibernate. If you want to test that, you can run (as root) swapoff -a, which should disable all swap devices, pushing needed pages back in to RAM, but only until you reboot. If it’s stable, you can consider removing the swap partition(s) later.
Hugo can handle images through its asset pipelines, so you should be able to just store them with your markdown. I agree it’s a little more friction than a blogging pkatform, but it does mean that you can just write your posts in your editor of choice and publish them with just a command, or if you’re feeling fancy, set up git to trigger publishing when you push.