USB to Ethernet adapters are about as reliable as wifi connections, i.e. not very.
If they are using ChatGPT to "solve" networking issues, then it is probably better to never expose the network to the outside 🫠
No they are not. If you get one with a special low power CPU they can be about the same, but that very much depends on the exact model.
How? Laptops are especially optimized for low power consumption. if you turn off the screen, that is about as power efficient a server as you can get.
I looked into VyOS to replace my main firewall/IPS system (IPfire) with, as I would like to switch to running it in a VM, which is not recommended with IPfire. Seems pretty good so far with the new gratis semi-stable Stream releases.
And I set up Unified Push notifications with my Ejabberd server. Works great.
where anyone can create and fully own unstoppable communities.
One man's "unstoppable communities", are another man's "spam and NSFW content" 🤷
I think you need to make up your mind what you actually want. Gatekeeping access under the guise of fighting spam seems directly contradictory to the stated goal of your project, and assuming it wouldn't be flooded with such content when most of the internet consists of such was pretty naive.
Yes, and? That is in addition to not retaliating against US American imports and services to the EU. Basically a bribe on top.
Germany exports a lot of cars to the US. Yes, it is that simple and stupid sadly.
You can just make the questions more location or theme specific. There is no way a bot will not slip up on stuff like that, and it doesn't need to be 100% fail proof either.
We get a lot of LLM bot applications on our instance, and even if it would get 10x harder, they would be still really easy to spot.
Admin review of account applications in Lemmy works fine. If you ask people to write a bit, it's quite easy to sort out the bots as there are always give-aways. And if people use LLMs to write the responses, then that's on them 🤷
There is plenty of gas in the north sea. We just need to stop wasting it for things that can be better done with electricity from renewable power sources (and yes I know, current PV panels and batteries largely come from undemocratic China, but that is an entirely self-inflicted problem).
Under high load conditions maybe, but that is very rare in homelabs and especially for people just starting out like the OP.