Using a phone is simpler if all you have on you is your phone, which was my use case when my bank hadn't offloaded their wallet app to gpay. That, and having the phone already in hand for customer/loyalty cards.
So yes, it's handy. Jot handy enough to use gpay for it, of course, but handy nonetheless.
Keep an eye on [Asahi Linux](https://asahilinux.org/), then. A cursory glance shows Me support not being complete yet, but I assume it will be in time (and the missing stuff may or may not be a show stopper for you).
I've been running it on my NAS-slash-homeserver for... 5 or 6 years now, I think. Root on a single SSD, data on a few HDDs in RAID1. It's been great so far. My desktops are all btrfs too, and the integration between OpenSUSE's package manager and btrfs snapshots has been useful more than once.
Not sure about "all", but apart from that article being more pissy than strictly necessary, RAID1 can now, in fact survive losing ore than one disk. That is, provided you use RAID1C3 or C4 (which keeps 3 or 4 copies, rather than the default 2). Also, not really sure how RAID1 not surviving >1 disk failure is a slight against btrfs, I think most filesystems would have issues there...
As for the rest of the article — the tone rubs me the wrong way, and somehow considering a FS shit because you couldn't be bothered to use the correct commands (the scrub vs balance ranty bit) doesn't instill confidence in me that the article is written in good faith.
I believe the writer's biggest hangup/footgunnage with btrfs is still there: it's not zfs. Ymmv.
For a static site, you could use a stand-alone server like webmentiond[1]. Seems like that'd integrate similarly to what you're running now, but under your own control. There's also webmention.io[2] if you really don't want to self-host.
As for spam, the flow involves the receiver checking the sender to see if there's actually a link, before the mention is accepted. I think that is more effort than the average spammer is going to put in, although it's not 100%. Then again, neither are comments on somebody else's site.
The entire problem would be solved, mostly, if more sites would support and use webmentions by default. That way we don't need centralized hubs, we don't need to have a gazillion sites polling HN/Reddit/etc either. Just a simple ping from A to B, indicating a link.
To be fair, a DE does quote a bit more than just "showing wallpaper and few windows". If that's your only use, switch to something like Window Maker or maybe something even more sparse.
Nice writeup, and at the core not too different from what I'm doing myself (albeit with the server at home, not colo'd, and the specs are far more modest).
The only thing I'd change in your workflow, perhaps, is switching from docker CLI commands to docker-compose. That'd make things a lot more reproducible and easy to read, and if you group relevant containers into a compose file, they're also automagically networked together, which is handy.
Your "trick" of grouping TCP ports by the hundreds is something I might steal, I've been using $lastport+1 for a while and now there's a bit of guesswork involved whenever I need to do things that don't go through the proxy. Then again, that's not often, so I might leave it.
Or, if that is not sufficient, one of the increasing number of ethical and/or self-hosted services, like Plausible? There is no need whatsoever to ship this kind of data to an outside party.
Being open and making clear that you understood you goofed would be total opposite of the Streisand effect - where you'd try to _silence_ discourse with the unintended effect of amplifying it.
Right now, the issue is being downplayed, much to the chagrin of an increasingly knowledgeable set of computer users.
I believe Discourse was planning things but decided to scrap them. The person behind PixelFed (a federated Instagram-like platform) hinted at a [forum platform](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/105425592966902917), but I have no idea if there's any progress on that.
And of course, there's [Lemmy](https://lemmy.ml/), which is kinda like Reddit, but federated.
So yes, it's handy. Jot handy enough to use gpay for it, of course, but handy nonetheless.