Some people get into self hosting just because they’re interested in the mechanics of it, but many people I think got inducted by the fact that for example, Facebook or snapchat make it so difficult to save your own pictures or migrate to another service, or the possibility that Google is reading all of your emails, etc. Others may have been radicalized by a specific event, such as a service provider closing up business and therefore you lose your data.

For me, it was Spore com. I loved Spore, from the time I got it for my 10th birthday to maybe the age of 16 or 17 I poured hundreds or probably thousands of hours into this game. As I got older I became less invested in the gameplay and more invested in the creative aspect of it. I designed some badass creatures and spaceships that I was really proud of. I had a whole line of Spaceships that all served different roles in my head cannon, with different races of aliens following different themes.

EA/Maxis/whoever runs Spore now purged all of them from spore.com, and now they’re gone. Years of my childhood essentially put into a locked box and the key thrown away. For me it was like losing a scrapbook in a fire. What right did they have?

So I ask, What radicalized you?

  • @EnricoSuavePallazzoBEnglish
    3•7 months ago

    I was born this way. I ran a BBS as a kid in the 80s, way before the internet. (TBBS on a TRS-80). In mid 2000s, I setup a phpBB on some webhost for my hotrod/drag racing friends. I think I finally started hosting it from my house in 2015. My regular Windows 7 desktop running a no-ip DDNS client, with Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox VM, port 80 port-forwarded to it. Good times.

    But Radicalized – it was the events after Jan 6, where AWS/Apple/Google shutdown Parler and some other right-leaning sites. For all the other truly horrible shit that exists on the internet, the speed/way they colluded to shut that shit down was scary. At that point it was crystal clear that the bigs can/will shut you down on a whim and it was imperative to control your own data/infrastructure and having multiple options for connectivity and key service providers.