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 used Lightroom CC and I loved it… but one day I looked at there pricing and realised that if I ever go above 1TB the cost will go significantly up, and so I decided to look for something better, I always had the full library on my notebook and used the cloud features mainly to view photos on my tablet and phone. Darktable + PhotoPrism can do the same so why not?

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.

Love this post. Good example of why empowerment matters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cumulative cost of all these individual file services (iCloud, OneDrive, google drive). I realized I was paying for them all and still running out of space…eventually, I figured there had to be a better way.

A bunch of little things for me, little steps down the road to hell:

• Google print worked, and then it died, with no replacement. So, I built a print server.
• Google music was awesome, I could upload my whole library and stream it anywhere. It was easily accessible through any Google device. Then it died and became Yahoo music, and… I can’t stream it anywhere. I can barely find it.
• Netflix went from “Share your password!” to “You need a premium account to stream above SD quality lol”. It’s awful trying to find shows these days. The last five movies I wanted to stream, I would have needed five different streaming services. I did the math, and realized it was cheaper for me to physically purchase the DVDs and rip them than to stream them. Jellyfin it is!
• I started with Vivint for smart house stuff, realized it was hella expensive and switched to Wink and Alarm. com, then realized it was still expensive and super limited, so I switched to OpenHAB.

That last one was probably the biggest eye-opener. There are so many paid services that are objectively worse than basic free self-hosted services. Wink was ok, but I can do so much more without it. And none of this was hard. I spent hours setting up Jellyfin, but it took less time than for me to work to pay for 6 streaming services. Sure, it doesn’t have the latest whatever, but so what? At least I know where to find where Stargate: SG1 is streaming!

For me it was the story about a dad who got his entire Google account shut down because a picture got flagged as CP. The dad took Google to court and it was proven that the pictures were taken to send to the pediatrician and were objectively not CP. Google refused to reinstate the account even after he was proven innocent.

After recently having a daughter of my own, I don’t want to run the risk of losing all my photos and everything I have in Google, all because Google can’t admit they were wrong.