I don't usually get involved in internet drama so I wasn't aware of this.
I started with Conduit. I hit some bugs though, and development was very slow. I looked at all the forks. Conduwuit was the most active, and all the issues I had were solved, so I used it. It got archived because of some other internet drama, and the readme said to use Tuwunel instead, which is what I'm using now.
Should I use something else?
I dunno. Use whatever I guess, as long as it's not Synapse.
In my area, they removed the data caps last year, when they also rolled out the higher upload speeds (eg the gigabit plan now has 350Mbps upload speed instead of 25Mbps). I don't think they've rolled that out everywhere though.
They also have a habit of keeping people on old plans that are either slower or more expensive. If you're still using Comcast/Xfinity, check their site and see what they offer to new customers at your address. (you may need to use an internet connection other than your Comcast one, otherwise they may detect that you're an existing customer)
Their pricing can differ by region. Not every region got the data caps back when they rolled them out.
It also depends on competition - if there's a lot of competition in your area, Comcast will have better deals compared to if you live somewhere where Comcast is the only option.
I used to live in an apartment that had an exclusivity deal with Comcast (residents were only allowed to use Comcast for internet service). Now I live somewhere in the same county where there's three different fiber providers in addition to Comcast, and their prices here are noticeably cheaper vs the old apartment.
They used to charge you more for unlimited data if you didn't use their modem. Renting their modem plus getting unlimited data was $30/month, but just getting unlimited data with your own modem was $50/month.
Not relevant any more though, as (at least in my area) they completely removed the data caps.
I'm so glad I have a local ISP that provides 10Gbps for cheaper than Comcast's 1Gbps.
rcrypt can handle encryption transparently: https://rclone.org/crypt/. You can use rclone mount to mount storage from practically any provider.
This is going to happen with every large centralized service, especially if they let you use it for free. These services end up being expensive to run.
The only real solution is to use something decentralized. You're already on Lemmy so I assume you already know this. Matrix is decent (not perfect, but it's pretty good) and it's easily self-hostable using Tuwunel.
Infinite scroll is used in so many UIs that I can't imagine it being wholly banned.
I'd like to see that too, but R&D costs for a product like this are enormous so I doubt it'd happen any time soon.
I still don't understand your point. With a firewall on the router, there's no difference between IPv4 and IPv6. Both are firewalled at the router. Where are the "bugs and vulns"?
If you mean my original point of the firewall not being enabled by default, I haven't seen that recently. It was a problem historically.
I don't trust the prebuilt images that providers provide so I like installing from my own ISO.
cloud-init is useful sometimes, but I recently had an issue with Alpine's alternative implementation (tiny-init) where it was setting a root password I didn't know. It was pulling it from some sort of metadata, but there was nowhere in my provider's control panel to set the default root password. Alpine also doesn't have any documentation about how to disable tiny-init, so I had to read the code and figure it out myself (create a file called /etc/tiny-cloud.disabled before init runs).
cloud-init also can't configure LUKS encryption. I know its usefulness is limited on a VM (since the provider can snapshot the memory and retrieve the encryption key that way), but it's still useful when the VM isn't running or if you stop using that provider to ensure they can't recover the data, and it's required in some cases (eg Plaid required me to certify that all data is encrypted at-rest before they gave me access to their API)
Having a default firewall is also a blessing, which all good routers should do. NAT is a curse.
Meanwhile there's rumours of Apple working on airpods with built-in cameras π