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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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.
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
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’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.
- The overall enshittification of online digital services.
- The fact that I was at the mercy of multiple companies and my ISP to turn on/off my smart devices connected to my LOCAL network
- The fact that I was paying for spotify just to play the same few hundred songs, most of which I’d already purchased in the past. Same thing for Disney+ and the kids shows my nephews watch.
- The company that provided the password manager I used got hacked
- I was using a digital assistant with an always-on microphone as a glorified timer.
That’s just off the top of my head.
What’s your current password manager solution? I just use bitwarden because I read it is open source
gen x.I grew up owning applications and media.The move to cloud and rent everything is not something im a fan of.The one exception is streaming shows.
Self-hosting was the logical progression of using Linux as my primary computing environment for 10+ years.
Porn, heh…
I found that my favourite videos and channels on Pornhub kept getting removed, so I decided to download my porn. But I needed to organize the collection, so I found a little app called Stash, which allows you to self-host a private porn site with all the bells and whistles! I then decided to download Jellyfin and do something similar for movies and TV shows. I wanted to have my media collection available on-demand from all my devices, so I got a little HP mini-PC and a Synology NAS which are running my services 24/7
For me it’s simply being GenX. We used to have to roll our own, and when companies wanted to finally cloud-this or -that, it was natural simply to resist.
I’m not a Luddite; I’ll use the cloud when it’s convenient, but I always have backup options and other ways of doing things.
I am frugal, though, and I won’t pay for shit just because it’s convenient. I pay for Netflix, but view its content alternatively. Same for Disney. But I won’t pay for Apple Music or whatever Amazon keeps asking me to upgrade to. I won’t pay for some stupid telephone app to sync my data. I will pay for USENET access, though.
A tp-link wifi plug that wouldn’t work if the internet went down.
Zigbee plugs and HA all the way after that!
And I avoid tp-link products with a passion.
HA is what?
It all started with my father, who dreamed of re-watching films from his childhood. As it was difficult (impossible) to find them in the shops, I used the alternative method. It all started with collecting old films from his era. For my part, ever since I was a child, I’ve had this “little voice in my head” telling me "what would happen if one day the suppliers of music, films, books… disappeared (because of politics, war, the end of sales… or whatever). Since then, I’ve digitally preserved everything I can (I only keep things that are hard to find, useful or that I like). And… mainly because I love technology and discovering all the things people can build with their keyboards.
Have you seen: http://rarefilmm.com/film-index/
No, I don’t, thank you very much :D!
I have the impression that everything is in English, do you know of anything similar that offers other languages? My father doesn’t speak English unfortunately
There are some non-English films on that site, but yes it would be good to see a lot more old other-language films too.
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.
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.
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
As I got older it seemed to me like all the various streaming services like Netflix and Spotify and Stadia (and its failed predecessors) were efforts at the eradication of the very concept of ownership. The shows and movies on Netflix don’t offer residuals to the actors or other production workers. Spotify doesn’t pay shit for the musicians on the platform.
The whole situation just looks bleak for everyone (except for the MBAs and shareholders) but especially the people producing the content. I’m happy to buy digital media if I can download and it keep it offline DRM-free. I will pay money for that kind of product because I get to keep it.