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?
Privacy was my breaking point, and it happened recently.
Been using the internet for 26 years now. Never particularly had a problem with spam, despite never really caring about what happens with my data. I just never got any. Shared everything with google, signed up to all sorts with the same e-mail and same phone number and card, no VPNs or anything, same few passwords.
A couple months ago, that all changed when something somewhere leaked my phone number and e-mail, and it’s all turned to quite a mess.
So I’ve reset, opened a new e-mail, attached that to my own domain name, and further attached that to self-hosted email masks. If I don’t like the e-mail provider… plug my domain elsewhere. If I don’t like the domain registrar… take my domain elsewhere. And the e-mail masks are infinite. I can spin up unique ones for every service.
I’ve got a solid password manager that integrates with that so every service gets a unique email and password.
I’ve got a few really cheap $2 sim cards, and when I need to sign up to certain things, it gets one of them. I’m planning on finding a decent VoIP provider because I can just transfer the numbers to the provider, and will only need to buy a cheap sim on the odd occasion a service doesn’t accept it, and then my actual phone will just have a number that absolutely no one is given. Not connected to anything.
I’m struggling to find something like privacy.com for non-US citizens. But once I’ve found a decent and affordable one, I’ll be on that in a moment. This has the added benefit of helping with my budgeting.
And pretty much anything that doesn’t need my real name, gets a pseudonym.
For home I’ve got a decent VPN setup, I’ve got all sorts of adblocking through pihole and ublock origin.
When I’m done with all this, anything I sign up to should have a unique name, email, password, phone number, and payment card. Nothing to link together in their datasets. Any spam call or email or txt I receive will be very obvious where it came from.
Is it perfect? Nah. Could a bad actor still put 2 and 2 together or are there gaps because I’m still learning? Absolutely. But honestly I’m enjoying the process of learning, so it’s worth it.