The thing that did me in was 2 things

• Google music shut down
• Netflix pulled Danger 5

I now had nowhere to upload my own music, and Danger 5 at the time was literally unobtainable legally unless you bought super expensive used region locked DVDs

I had enough and spun up a plex server and now here we are

I’ve had a homelab for many years. The drive for me to move to full self hosting everything was icloud photos.

Had to reinstall my Mac, and as part of that I wanted to take a full backup of my photo library. Clicked “download originals”… Failed. Tried again, downloaded 2 and failed. Contacted support and was told it would be investigated. 6 weeks later I finally had access to my photos.

I said to my wife “no company should be able to stop us accessing our own stuff, there’s going to be changes”. Beyond email (as I hate running mail servers), 3 years later I use zero cloud services for data.

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.

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.

AI, ironically. specifically, my data being used to train big models without my consent (or, sneakily un-opt-out-able consent by using services online). it’s been accelerating the enshittification of everything by a ton. self-hosting has been a nice reprieve honestly.

As someone else mentioned, I just got sick and tired of online ‘service’ companies seeing me as a product or as a ‘means to an end’ that only has to be manipulated or prodded to get the result THEY are after.

Years ago, I saw that celebrities were getting PAID to wear fashion but normal chumps like me were wearing brands from head to toe trying to identify with that ‘cool factor.’

Now, I try not to wear shirts or hats with logo’s, etc… even the sports teams I like. Same, with few exceptions.

And I hate that so many apps are just vehicles used to market to me so they can grab MY data for free! Hey, if you want my data, make me an offer on the free market! I want the same opportunities offered to the rich and famous.

And lastly, I agree with someone who mentioned streaming services and their offerings which are diminished and constricted to ‘encourage’ you to ‘level up’ for services that used to be included at the level you signed up for or paid for.

Having far more fine control over, of all things, email. Being able to operate an entire domain and control what happens with every email address in it. I now have a different email address for every legal entity I interact with, sometimes on a per-interaction basis. If I get spam, I know exactly where they scraped the email address from and I can set that specific email address (plus or minus any other data such as which domain it’s coming from) to reject with a custom response or display any other behavior in the email protocol, which is surprisingly extensive once you start looking at it.

The gradual move to lease/rent everything instead of owning it. That’s how they keep you consuming and spending money without actually owning anything.

Everyone’s always been telling me get netflix, get disney+ for the kids. So what, I can spend 100$+ a month for these services because one show I want is not on this platform?

Fuuuhuuuk this.

Arr is the way.

Also I’ve been a sysadmin for 10+ years and I just enjoy managing my own production environment for everything from e-mail to media serving.

Love this post. Good example of why empowerment matters.

Apple’s near-adoption of NeuralHash.

For years I was comfortable with using big tech companies that had strong tech credentials and a level of trust in the community for implementing things well, securely, and in a way that preserves privacy and respect for the user. Closed systems provided by them were therefore trustworthy to me, having faith that the world-class security professionals and software developers and product owners were all implementing things well, even though I had only limited direct visibility of that. Apple in particular had a reputation for having the most respect for users and their privacy.

Then NeuralHash broke the spell for me. I had an epiphany, a sudden realisation that the untrustworthiness I knew existed in other companies existed in these ones too. I switched to a firm belief that if it’s possible for a company to do something naughty with your data, then on a long enough timeline it’s inevitable that they will.

I resolved then to avoid big tech wherever I can, and where I can’t I try to implement things in a way such that it isn’t ever possible for them to do nasty things with my stuff. I’ve de-Googled, de-Appled, and de-Amazoned, and returned to having a strong emphasis on managing my privacy and taking ownership of as much of what I use as I can.

Looking back I think that Google Reader going away was probably my first motivation to host services myself as opposed to just storing files on my network.

I had a little Synology at the time that I was just using as a NAS but when Google Reader when away I fired up FreshRSS I believe and started doing it myself.

I don’t actually run an RSS reader server now and I suspect they aren’t as popular as they were so maybe Google actually was onto something shuttering it HOWEVER we won’t give them bonus points for that, just points for getting me into self hosting 😂

This happened to me too. I had over 1000 creations published in Sporepedia and when I changed my computer I decided to just re-download them from the servers instead of copying them from the old pc, but they were almost all gone

Everything going SaaS. You want me to pay for the service AND sell my data. That’s a no from me dawg.

If I really look back it all started with my own cable modem and router to save $10 a month on my Comcast bill. This led to DD-WRT and eventually OpenWRT on my routers throughout the years.

Then I spun up a media server for all my movies, shows, stand-up comedy specials, music, pictures, etc.

Had to have a hypervisor for virtual machines…

Next came my NVR camera system and VPN because FUCK having my footage ever leave my house.

…to name a few lol.

I don’t really see it as radical, I think it’s conservative. For ~80 years people kept their own media, and they loved it (photo books, slide shows, album collections). Relatively recently subscription capitalism has tried to disrupt that, and people generally hate it. It certainly doesn’t seem to make them feel good, anyway.

I just think we can return to the normal, better way, so I do.