Repost bots (which repost contents from other sites) might be to blame for a lot of this. Or the fact that, because there are loads of (for example) World News communities, people will post the same links on multiple communities, but most people will only comment on one of the submissions. Which pushes the link-to-comment ratio up.
Beyond that, it really depends on the community I think. I see far more of that when browsing All than when browsing Subscribed.
Most of my data is backed up to (or just stored on) a VPS in the first instance, and then I backup the VPS to a local NAS daily using rsnapshot (the NAS is just a few old hard drives attached to a Raspberry Pi until I can get something more robust). Very occasionally I'll back the NAS up to a separate drive. I also occasionally backup my laptop directly to a separate hard drive.
Not a particularly robust solution but it gives me some piece of mind. I would like to build a better NAS that can support RAID as I was never able to get it working with the Pi.
I like my Garmin Vívoactive 3. It has all the basic features (for casual walking/running) and looks okay.
I really like the look of the "hybrid" watches like the Garmin Vívomove or Withings watches. They look great but as far as I know none of them have in-built GPS.
Would be very interested in checking out the BangleJS 2 as well.
There are definitely other win conditions, but it's still winner-takes-all. So say if an ally is really strong scientifically or culturally it inevitably becomes in your interest to destroy them.
Not to be That Guy, but Discord is another corporate proprietary walled garden just like Twitter and Reddit and given recent experiences I think it should be avoided by the Fediverse community. See also this blog post (I am not affiliated with its author, I just think it expresses the point well).
There are several alternatives. If you want real-time chat, Matrix or IRC would work. If you just want to make announcements, an RSS feed or mailing list would do the trick.
Just my two cents. Thanks for your work in setting up and maintaining this instance!
Edit: Bonus see also
This looks promising, thanks!
Vaultwarden is not compiled from Bitwarden's code, it's a separate project and codebase but designed to be compatible with Bitwarden's API.
Bitwarden is open source and you can self-host it but IIRC it's a bit more complex and resource-hungry than Vaultwarden.
I don't think I need more power. The charging and headphone ports don't work (so need to use wireless charging) and battery life is quite poor. I don't feel like the phone is too slow or anything so I imagine the FP5 would be plenty of power.