I download them either from Youtube or from the podcasts’ RSS feeds.

In this case it’s not just about anonymity imo. I just read enough stories to know that leaving a card that can be charged at any time tied to an account is a bad practice.

AFAIK you’d still need to leave your card details to use free offers. No thanks, I’d rather pay $5 but in crypto.

Which mini-pc would you recommend? RPis are not sold here officially and thus very expensive.

A proxy to go to blocked sites (which is pretty much my justification for paying the price), potentially some obfuscating solution later if shit hits the fan. An IRC bouncer (what I actually get the most use of). A hobby website. An XMPP server. Mumble in case I ever have friends to play video games with.

And without an ability to host the network yourself!

I personally don’t use automation, I just have a Veracrypt volume for storing backups and do them manually. Rarely full-system, mostly just home folder.

landchad.net was useful for me.

I recently started hosting XMPP with Prosody, and now try to get people besides my family there. Thought of Matrix but it seems to be the same thing but bloated. Most of my groupchat socialization is on IRC (I have a bouncer in the same place), but that’s not with people I know IRL.

AFAIK even without ircv3 history is possible - at least Unrealircd offers such an option (https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history). However, I have only ever seen this utilized once, on a very small server.