The literal definition of circle jerk is When a group of ppl sit in a circle, stimulating the other sexually.
I’m not sure this is quite like what happened here, so I’d go with the other, more popular definition from urban dictionary you hinted at:
The act of constantly sharing the same opinion in a forum full of people who are obviously known to have the same opinion as yours
RetroShare and µwire are probably the only ones really guaranteeing you anonymity. Nothing is safe without a VPN or a network which anonymises you.
You don’t have to be an Exit Node with Tribler.
With whom do you want to share your library? If it’s only friends, you should be able to create a meshed wireguard VPN and just provide a file share in SMB or something similar.
usually SSD space limited and Matrix likes to blow up it’s database size.
Since v1.61, the Synapse Matrix home server (which I guess you mean with “Matrix” in this case) has gotten new controls to keep the media directory smaller and you can run synapse_janitor SQL commands to reduce the DB size.
all in all Matrix server costs tend to increase over time.
This is correct.
My database of a server running since 2018 or so is about 57GiB in size and I didn’t compact it for about a year now. The media directory is 21GiB in size, however I limit uploads to 10MiB.
I guess a server with 100GiB of SSD space is plenty enough if you don’t join the largest rooms with >20,000 members. A server with 480GiB RAID-1 costs you about 24€ at kimsufi.com, so that’s what I’d plan for to run a Matrix system with a pleasant experience. You still have to do backups, of course, which adds another 10-15€ per month…
Let’s do a quick back of the envelope calculation with 5W for an SBC and 15W for a PC.
5W*24h*30d*0,15€/kWh
=0.54€
So an SBC costs you at least 0.54€ if you disregard the network traffic also using up more energy within your network (routers, switches, APs all use more energy if they don’t idle around). The regular PC costs you at least 1.62€. And that’s for a very cheap energy price – for Germany you can triple that and pay 1.62€ for the SBC and 4.86€ for a PC.
And that’s an energy efficient PC! Some of them use 50W in idle, which means you can at least triple the price again. And for 15€ you can get a pretty good Matrix server in Germany which probably has a faster internet connection than you at home ;)
If you have a decent internet connection at home, and a spare computer (eg a raspberrypi or something), and you don’t mind everyone knowing your home IP address, it could cost as little as $0.
This is not the full picture, you usually still have to pay for electricity and the system itself. It’s not free.
Did you do backups? If so, what did that cost?