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?
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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
Love this post. Good example of why empowerment matters.
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.
Running out of harddrive space
It all started with a raspberry pi… i wanted to host game servers for me and my friends without having to pay for them. This expanded to plex for movies and bookstack for dnd notes. Now I have so many services that I have to look it up to give you a full list.
I’m about to go over Google photos limit, and I already pay for it, next tier is more than double what I pay now.
Quickbooks and to a lesser degree Windows.
This is around 2000 or so: Quickbooks was keeping customer data, requiring you to keep their service forever. They also got in trouble later on for selling customer data. I noticed that Quickbooks did nothing but make an accountants job easier, so why didnt the accountant pay for it?
In any case, the biggest issue was I hated quickbooks (Intuit) as a company, AND they required a license for each machine it was installed on, requiring either additional licenses or getting people to enter data on the same machine.
I ran a small business that visited clients in many nations, so I learned Linux, built out an accounting tool myself, and then served it as a web page and an X forwarded app to clients anywhere in the field. I started hosting my own website, running my own email, and it just grew from there.
TL;DR: Intuit can suck it. Vendor lock in and vendor rules make me choose to make my own rules.
It’s just that now I finally can. Between Tailscale and NixOS, its now fun and easy to set up reproducibly and available from anywhere
My age.
I remember about a decade ago when wiping your phone daily to install the new ROM was not that much big deal. I think a lot of stuff was unstable more unstable than it is now but we relied less on it. Now. I can not imagine loosing some data or some things that are important to me.
Also regulation. I worked in ecosystem that if it was a cloud service you would have to sooo much extra time on paperwork for only a chance of not getting denied. There was also some other legislation out right eliminated a number of services. Local became only real option.
I had to reinstall Onedrive at work. Doing that screwed up so much I spent a total of about 8 hours to get everything working again and 2 more to redo the work that was lost before reinstalling. Now I view anything that I don’t control directly as ephemeral.
Isn’t that a bit too radical, though? Don’t you start feeling like, “if you want to do an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe?”
For me, it’s not so much about direct control but that I don’t want to lose the option. The way I see it, if a service is built on open standards and is well managed, I don’t mind having it run by someone else. But if whatever service you are trying to sell me denies me the option of taking my data and going elsewhere, it’s an instant nope for me.
It’s maybe very radical in worldview, but not in action. I still use stuff like netflix, spotify and youtube instead of downloading everything and share files through cloud storage, I just view it as something I can enjoy/use now that might not be around in the future. If I really want to keep something, the only things I can trust are myself and FOSS.
I first tried out Plex like a decade ago because The Simpsons weren’t available online in any way and I hated having to change DVDs all the time. I loved that it remembered where I’d left off too.
I was using it to track which episodes I’d rewatched as I prepared for a Simpsons trivia competition. My team ended up taking second place! We won a case of donuts. :-)
Two things really: Dropbox as an automatic solution for file syncing and sharing; I needed to pay for an upgrade so I switched first to Onecloud and then Nextcloud.
The second was due to my work: I was an academic, teaching mathematics, and we were experimenting with online assessment systems. Most publishers provide one of their own, but then you have issues with contracts, student access etc. For example, a student could get access for one year. But many of our students were part-time, and took 18 months or more. This meant repeated calls to the publishers to issue new access codes. Since I already had a VPS, I put an open source mathematics assessment system on it and we ran it happily for a few years. I didn’t mind paying for it myself at the start, considering it experimental, but when the university refused to host it themselves I gave up on it. It was good while it lasted, though.
I now need a decent photo management system (Immich sounds good) and start weaning myself away from Google.
I was never radicalized myself. I’ve always self-hosted. I spent time in centralized ecosystems like most here, but ultimately I still self-host because I like to have some level of control
It’s not difficult to save your pictures from Snapchat. You’re overreacting
