If they do that, nearly no one will find it, though. Are there larger non-federating servers?

I think the problem with this approach - read: the reason I don't do this - is that you're blocking communities from ever appearing again, and if your interests change, you still won't see them. I think this is more likely to result in creating an echo chamber.
What I do is subscribe to communities that I found interesting, and then scroll all once in a while to see if there's something else I like

I'm mostly reading my subscribed feed, and sometimes switch to all and if I find an interesting community, I subscribe to it too. The only communities I have blocked are either porn related or operating in a foreign language, which I see even though havening set my language preferences.

I don't consider myself to have a lot of tech knowledge. I'm not working in the field, and there's lots of things I want to do better than now.

If you don't yet know about what is systemd and how does it work, it's fine. The documentation of the unit files is a bit more complicated than warranted, like, it's structure is not that readable, but the syncthing documentation helps in what you need to do

But there are many ways such as access logs, server monitoring etc

Which are all in the control of the company running the servers. If we trust the company, we can trust them giving honest information on these, but if we don't trust the company.. they could just redact logs or even straight out fake them

I only have one question: how will your company find out?

Attempts to remove datamining, disallowed from installing microsoft proprietary extensions.

but within five seconds of reading syncthing's install instructions even I basically just said, "yeah...no."

Install instructions: download tarball, unpack, run. Done.

Did I miss something?
Autostart at system startup can be done with the basic utilities of the OS.
Windows: scheduled tasks. Systemd/Linux: they have a basic service file that you just have to drop in the right folder, and run 2 commands (start, enable).
Piece of cake. Not telling this because I already know how these work, but because as I remember, these steps are documented.

Telegram just claims to be private, but they can't prove it with technical means, instead they rely on the narrative that they are not data brokers. All the while they have strong connection with suspicious parties like the UAE, and from time to time publish weird announcements like the tucker carlson interview that is also said to have contained a far right dogwhistle

Yeah, the way is to test it with a client that wants to use it. Element X can only use that, as I know, so if it can't log in, that means you probably didn't set it up correctly

If you run it on a container, it should be enough to just make a copy of the set up volumes, right? (with permissions and all the metadata kept of course)

Mixnets for the win!

I'm not the one who you were responding to, but considering google's history, I don't believe anything they claim, because they have lied so many times in the past, and because every "privacy guarantee" they provide is practically unprovable. It's nothing more than wishful thinking to think that google does nothing with government data stored with them, with google classroom data of millions of children, and others. They have shown that they can't be trusted.

You're right, I misunderstood it

Definitely ddrescue. Unlike traditional dd, it can deal with failing drives, it's operation is resumable, and has some other features that's helpful. I would recommend using it even if your drive is fine.
What it produces is a byte for byte copy just like dd.

I've been a social media hermit for the past 3 years but recently

I doubt that they have uploaded any kind of photos

If you want to invent and maintain your wheel then go ahead.. but I think we have better things to do than maintaining half the code of an operating system.

Udisksctl has a variety of relevant features, and it works good, kind of.

Is this a joke?

Obviously, 8 wide tabs are too much. That's like defining Pi as 5.

The benefit of the higher resolution shouldn't be about the colors, but that with bigger screens the movie does not start to get blurry.

For desktop use on a desktop display, I don't see the benefit either. Even less on a phone, that is totally unnecessary.

If you’re at that point of not trusting a company, the best practice would be to avoid using their devices or connecting them to your network.

Yes, that would be the best practice. However there are a lot of best practices that cannot be followed for one reason or another.