Have you ever ventured into the rabbit hole of de-bigTech’ing your life?

Well, I have dabbled in it on and off over the last ten years. It’s not impossible. Big tech has made the journey impractical. To do anything online nowadays you need to have a Paypal, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft account. Paypal to make any online payments with relative ease, Facebook to verify you are an actual person with profile age detection, Google for password-less authentication, and Microsoft because your Operating system requires you to share your identity to further track you. Why is that? To provide a convenient way to log in? Or could it be security? It is both of those things, but it is also a couple other things. Retention of attention, vendor lockdown, and using the customer as a revenue source. Most services I pay for are to keep my data seperate from the data I choose to put on “gratis” platforms. I choose to have 100 terabytes in my basement homelab to store my photos and precious memories instead of Google Photos or iCloud Photos.

This choice is definetely NOT Gratis. But it is Libre. Not because I think there are monsterous powers that are targeting me individually. But because I know that there are faults in even the best security models. I’m not saying mine is any better than Facebook, or Amazon’s storage solutions. But it is under my control, so if anything were to happen to it, it would be on me, nobody else. Sure I back up off site. But it sits in encrypted shards on those two backup providers. I’m a huge self hosted proponent for anyone that is relatively nerdy, (Funny because this is on a hosted provider. But I pay them and they’re a cool hosting company with good ethics).

#What do you host yourself?

Well locally:

  • Mesh Central
  • Trillium Notes (Looking into Joplin or something Similar)
  • Pi-hole DNS
  • ARRR Stack
    • NZBGet
    • Sonarr
    • Radarr
    • Plex
  • IceCast server (Art Bell Live)
  • YuNohost for testing some cool apps. FreshRSS RSS-Bridge Uptime Kuma
  • Mumble
  • NextCloud for Photo backups and “Google Drive” like functions. In the Cloud?
  • HRCC.wiki
  • Minecraft server
  • MVS3.8 mainframe emulator
  • Cronicle (Over four servers two local and two in the cloud) #Why?

It’s like gaming to me. I’ve always liked the idea of technological self-reliance. It’s just another hobby to fulfil my pedantic nature. It’s the same reason I like Ham Radio. Self hosted and self supported communications. It’s also great for learning while actively working. I have a more than full time job professionally, and have a family. I’ve never been great at sitting in a class and memorizing things. I learned more about math in Wood Shop than I did in a class room. I learned more about manufacturing engineering while at my previous job as a production manager. I learned more about IT while being an MSP for small insurance agencies than I would have in a class room. You get the point. I’m a hands on learner.

Much like you gaining experience in gaming, fishing, golfing, by practicing. I and many other people wanted to learn how tech worked. So we started self hosting our own things. Degoogling has just been a weird side effect. It’s not a hobby for everyone. It is one for a lot of people though. I’m working on getting my own family (Small Business Owner) to start self hosting some things because in their usecase, with relibality and cost in mind itmakes sense to do so.