I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground. That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car. Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we’re all running in our homelabs. Here’s what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting. Every service you don’t self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It’s baked into the infrastructure. Individual privacy is a losing game. You can’t opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here’s what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn’t feed their systems at all. When you run Nextcloud, you’re not just protecting your files from Google - you’re creating a node in a network they can’t access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren’t sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren’t being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE. I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That’s when I realized: we can’t rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own. This isn’t about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:

Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Passwords that aren’t in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass

Media that doesn’t feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome

Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea

Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger. Where to start if you’re new:

Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation. Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft. Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust. Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.

If you’re already self-hosting:

Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.

The goal isn’t purity. You’re probably still going to use some corporate services. That’s fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there’s a network that can’t be dismantled by a single executive order. I’m working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it’ll be profitable, but because I’ve realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure. We’re not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we’re building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that’s a node in a system they can’t control. They want us to be data points. Let’s refuse.

What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?

EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I’m just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think “rule of three” sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.

More importantly, a few people asked about a “0 to 100” guide - or even just “0 to 50” for those who don’t want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my “Where to start” list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:

The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It’s appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.

The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.

The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.

I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.

  • MoffKalast@lemmy.world
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    1 个月前

    In a fascistic enough world where this would matter, people who abstain from the system are automatically flagged to be shot too, just fyi. You gotta also fill the normie services with conformist content to not become a detected anomaly if you really want to do it properly.

    • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 个月前

      This is the “Gray Man” strategy. If you have zero digital footprint in 2026, that absence of data becomes a data point itself. Anomalies get investigated.

      I think we need to separate Camouflage from Logistics.

      I’m not suggesting you delete your digital existence and live in a Faraday cage. By all means, keep the normie accounts. Post the cat photos on Instagram. Keep a Gmail address for the spam. Feed the algorithm just enough “conformist” content to look boring. That is your camouflage.

      But Resistance Infrastructure isn’t about hiding, it’s about capability.

      It’s about ensuring that when the “system” decides to de-platform your community group, or lock your bank account, or shut off the internet in your region during a protest, you still have a way to function.

  • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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    The average person doesn’t understand anything about technology and probably won’t even be able to install an operating system. The Internet literally became what it is now precisely because everything was left to corporations. For example, sip telephony is as decentralized and secure as possible, but how many people keep their own telephone exchange? therefore, it is more realistic for the average person to simply use services outside the jurisdiction of the state than to install something on their own. In some countries, it is also illegal to engage in self-hosting.

    but if we talk about people who are interested enough, then yes, you can do self-hosting. However, people who are ready to understand at least a little, for example, according to the latest steam statistics, make up about 5% of the total mass.

    • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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      Honestly, you’re right about the skill gap, the convenience trap is exactly how Big Tech won in the first place, but I don’t think the goal is to turn every single person into a sysadmin. My time teaching at the library with the Cyber Seniors program showed me that people don’t need to know how to flash an OS to deserve privacy, they just need a doorway that isn’t owned by a corporation.

      If the 5% who actually know how this stuff works start building “community nodes” for their family, their block, or a local shop, then the 95% get all the benefits without the technical headache. We don’t need everyone to be an expert, we just need enough local infrastructure so that “the cloud” isn’t the only option left. It’s not about total purity for everyone, it’s just about building enough exit ramps so the machine becomes optional, you know?

      • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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        1 个月前

        so you’re suggesting storing sensitive data, work documents, passwords, not from a company with which there are at least some legal agreements, but from a neighbor, simply because you see him from time to time? what could possibly go wrong…

        UPD: By the way, if we are talking about a state, your neighbor will be approached in the same way as Google, because everyone in the country obeys the same laws.

        • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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          You’re hitting on the two biggest myths of the current era: that “legal agreements” with giants actually protect you, and that a neighbor is a bigger risk than a faceless corporation.

          First, when a tech giant gets a broad subpoena, they don’t fight it for you; they automate the handover because you’re just a line in a database of billions. When you host locally, you’re a specific node. If the state wants your data from a private server, they have to physically knock on a specific door. That is a massive increase in the “cost of surveillance” compared to a silent API request sent to a corporate data center.

          Second, this isn’t about “trusting a neighbor” with your plaintext data. In a proper sovereign setup, the data is end-to-end encrypted. I can host your Vaultwarden or your Nextcloud backups, but I don’t have the keys; I’m just providing the “digital real estate.” It’s the difference between giving someone your house keys and just letting them provide the land your safe sits on.

          The goal isn’t to make law enforcement impossible; it’s to make the “dragnet” impossible. If they want one person’s data, they have to work for it, rather than just pulling it from a corporate warehouse.

          • fizzle@quokk.au
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            1 个月前

            I dont think this really responds to the comment you replied to.

            Lots of comments in this thread are talking about people who dont have the time or expertise to manage their own nextcloud instance.

            Saving you stuff on your neighbour’s instance includes genuine risks to your privacy or sensitive information.

            The “legal agreements” that commenter referred to are simply the manner in which the host is allowed to use your data. The things you might store might be your will, maybe a spreadsheet of passwords, maybe some notes about your plans for a side hustle, maybe some naughty photos of your wife. Not information thats actionable by Google or Microsoft, but certainly things people dont want their neighbour to access.

          • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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            1 个月前

            I do not know about Amazon, but in telephony you simply have to install a threat management system in accordance with the law. I think Amazon has the same thing. if there is a court decision, the servers will be arrested or a request for data will be received. It’s exactly the same thing.

            what is configured on the server may or may not be enabled. and your neighbor just knows some of your data (your name, address, etc.), which increases the likelihood of an attack. To an Amazon engineer, you’re just bytes out of nowhere.

            the normal story would be to encrypt everything on the client before anything gets to the server at all. but who exactly is going to bother so much? in this case, you might as well upload a bunch of encrypted data to Google.

            • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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              Actually, you’re exactly right about client-side encryption being the answer, and that is the standard we are pushing for. But the reason you don’t just dump those encrypted files into a Google Drive is because of the metadata. Even if Google cannot read your “letter,” they are still mining the “envelope,” they know when you wrote it, where you were, and who you sent it to. In 2026, metadata is often more dangerous than the content itself because it is so easy to automate into a threat profile.

              As for the law, you’re right that a court order is a court order, but there is a massive difference in the “cost of surveillance.” Big tech companies have dedicated departments to automate data handovers for thousands of users at a time; it is a streamlined pipeline. A private server forces the state to slow down, to get a specific warrant for a specific physical machine, and to actually do the legwork. It turns a massive dragnet into a targeted investigation, which is exactly how the system is supposed to work.

              And regarding the “Amazon engineer” versus a neighbor, an engineer might not know my name, but the Amazon algorithm knows my pulse, my politics, and my habits better than anyone. If I use E2EE, the person hosting the hardware doesn’t have the keys anyway, so they are just a landlord for my digital safe, not a spy.

              • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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                Well, I don’t work in the USA, but in a telecom company, and I can say that if you really need it, they will just kick down the door and seize the server. no matter what. and a campaign interested in business is, after all, more technologically advanced than some guy who set up a server based on guides on the Internet. you won’t need to take anything from him, with a fairly weak literacy, it’s enough just to intentionally make a mistake in the public guide. Do you remember Hillary Clinton’s private email server case?

                • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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                  You’re right that if the state really wants you, they can always resort to physical force, but that’s exactly the point. In the current system, they don’t have to kick down any doors, they just send a silent request to a corporate office and get everything they need without you or your neighbors ever knowing. Forcing them to physically show up at a specific address in the real world drastically changes the “cost of surveillance,” it turns a cheap, automated dragnet into a slow, expensive, and public operation.

                  As for the Hillary Clinton example, that’s actually a perfect lesson in what happens when you prioritize convenience over security. Her setup was “shadow IT” at its worst, it had open ports, unencrypted connections, and none of the basic hardening we use in modern sovereign stacks like Docker or NixOS. It wasn’t built for resistance, it was built to bypass government record-keeping, and that lack of professionalism is exactly why it failed.

                  The “Amazon engineer” might only see bytes, but the Amazon algorithm sees your entire life story, your politics, and your vulnerabilities. If we use end-to-end encryption, it doesn’t matter if the guy hosting the box is a neighbor or a stranger, they can’t read the data anyway. We aren’t just following random guides, we are building professional-grade infrastructure that makes the “dragnet” fail by design. If the state has to kick down a door for one person’s data, the system is at least forced to follow a transparent process again.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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      1 个月前

      In some countries, it is also illegal to engage in self-hosting.

      Really?! Can you elaborate?

      • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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        It is impossible to place telephone nodes in Russia without equipping the server with threat protection equipment. Of course, I won’t buy a box for hundreds of dollars to use a home PBX, so technically I’m outside the law. =) It is also impossible to host sites with more than 10,000 visitors without registering with Roskomnadzor. and all accounts with authorization must support logging in through the public services portal or by phone number. considering that only legal entities can do this, of course I don’t do it.

        The United States and the European Union have data protection laws, so if you decide to save money on hosting for friends and install a server outside the Eurozone, depending on the data you store, you are also formally violating the law.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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          you are also formally violating the law

          As a population, I would venture to say that we are all formally violating the law in some form or other. Laws are written to be purposefully vague and ambiguous.

          It is impossible to place telephone nodes in Russia without equipping the server with threat protection equipment.

          I assume you are from Russia since you speak in first person, however, if the laws are so stringent against self hosting or private hosting, why is it a large portion of Warez sites emanate from Russia? They exist all over really, but it seems a lot of the very popular ones are in Russia.

          It is also impossible to host sites with more than 10,000 visitors without registering with Roskomnadzor

          This sort of ties in with the PBX thing. I am certain that popular Warez sites in Russia get way over 10,000 visitors and I’m sure they don’t register with Roskomnadzor.

          Just curious. I’ve always had a curiosity with Russia among other countries. The history is very intriguing and vastly unknown in the West because of obvious propaganda. There used to be a blog I followed years ago about people visiting and photographing abandoned structures in Russia. It was very interesting, but sadly I have lost track of it over the years. I always wanted to visit the Red Square, but sadly I am too old to realize that dream. I have been as far as Latvia, which is not part of Russia, but very beautiful as I remember.

          • nitrolife@rekabu.ru
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            1 个月前

            I assume you are from Russia since you speak in first person, however, if the laws are so stringent against self hosting or private hosting, why is it a large portion of Warez sites emanate from Russia? They exist all over really, but it seems a lot of the very popular ones are in Russia.

            because you might be surprised, but warez is not illegal in Russia. We have slightly different legislation in the field of intellectual property. Only the person who profits from warez can be held responsible. That is, either an organization that uses it commercially, or a seller. If I break the software or record a movie for the sake of art or love for my neighbor without money or donations it’s legal. of course, websites are responsible even if they receive income from advertising, well, many of them are blocked for Russians. I go to rutracker via VPN =)

            But just try to talk with a voice call via telegram… You won’t be able to do that, because direct calls without anti-threat systems (i.e., after completely listening in on calls) are illegal.

            UPD: how that look right now

  • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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    1 个月前

    To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check

    This is the world we live in. If you can actually string words together into grammatically correct sentences, then you are AI. It matters not whether you are or you aren’t. Like the witch hunts of Salem, all that is necessary is the accusation. I personally don’t care if you used AI, the message resonates. Don’t let 'em give you shit about your pony tail.

    • Potatar@lemmy.world
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      It is freeing really. I used to proof read my comments, then paste in google search to check for easy to catch typos. When AI arrived, I was even putting my text through them so they are more “common tongue” and not my personal shorthands.

      Now I just post it.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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        It’s a tool. A tool that needs some heavy regulation, but a tool nonetheless

  • q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.world
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    I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.

    Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.

    • h333d@lemmy.worldOP
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      You’re right. We’ve been traded convenience for our autonomy for way too long, and it’s created this massive power imbalance where a few tech bros basically own the digital roads we walk on. Voting with your wallet is a huge first step, but like you said, the real work starts when we actually take responsibility for our own data.

      That’s exactly why I’m moving toward helping local businesses and groups build out their own nodes. It’s one thing to stop paying for a subscription, but it’s another thing entirely to stand up your own infrastructure that doesn’t report back to a corporate mother-ship. Every person who rejects the “default” and builds a private alternative is a small win for the rest of us, it’s about making the corporate extraction model fail by simply making it unnecessary.

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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    Always has been.

    Even if you like who’s in charge right now, they could change how they act or they could be replaced.

    They could shut us down or do a lot of things, but it’s harder to break 10,000 servers than one.

  • morto@piefed.social
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    Don’t stop at self-hosting. We need all forms of community building, from organizing like-minded people to gardening, off-grid energy, etc.

  • quantumcheap@lemmy.world
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    It’s not often I hear meet others on the same page, but I too see self-hosting as a form of resistance against corporate control and surveillance capitalism. Rather than trying to bring self-hosting to individuals, I’ve steered my efforts towards affecting technological change in groups and organizations instead. While this narrows the pool of those who can set up sovereign infrastructure, it gets more people using the open-source alternatives as part of their collaborative work.

    To support that, I’m building out such an IT reference architecture for nonprofits, activist groups, and communities. The networking model is such that services can be hosted on cheap hardware and accessed through Wireguard tunnels managed by Netbird (and experimenting with Pangolin now). This keeps the servers under positive control of the data owners and uses only one or two VPS instances to handle proxying and accesses. Now, every organization’s requirements are different, but this baseline is meant to be a flexible proof-of-concept that can be adapted to their unique threat model. For example, an org can opt for just using a cloud-hosted service for certain components if the self-hosting burden is too great and their threat model determines it to acceptable.

    The docs are here at https://sts.libretechnica.org/ and the source for the docs and all the Ansible playbooks are at https://gitlab.com/libretechnica/SovereignTechStack/. I invite anyone to contribute, analyze, pick-apart, improve this model. In fact, I’m specifically seeking thoughts on whether this reference model can adequately address the risks and threats that self-hosters face.

    This is the first time I’m sharing this publicly; I was inspired by this post to finally spread awareness of the project and get more like-minded people involved.

    P.S. @h333d Sorry about the people who think your post is gen-AI. I used to proofread stuff all day long before the advent of LLMs, so I quickly recognize artificial text and yours reads nothing like it. I appreciate the time you took to write your post and it was a refreshing read.

    • BromSwolligans@lemmy.world
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      Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is (“if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle” is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don’t wanna run those things, you’ll have learned enough to host anything else you want.

  • artyom@piefed.social
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    Yeah I mean this is why I’ve always been concerned about privacy.

    The most flagrant example is the Pasco county “intelligence-led policing” where they used data acquired by databrokers and fed it into a prediction model that decided who was most likely to commit a crime, then harassed them at all hours of the day and night until they were coerced into committing a crime or they left town.

    I assume ICE is doing the same sort of things.

    This was always the inevitable result of all the data hoarding. Keep your data out of these databases and you just become nearly invisible to them.

  • teolan@lemmy.world
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    Just FYI unless you self-host headscale, tailscale is centralised and not private. They claim it is end to end encrypted but their proprietary centralised control server distributes the keys, so they could very easily MITM you.

    Tailscale is good tech and good crypto, but Applied cryptography cannot solve a security problem. It can only convert a security problem into a key-management problem, and tailscale does not do decentralised key management.

    • fort_burp@feddit.nl
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      Are you serious? I had no idea Tailscale was a “trust me bro” kind of operation. I’ve always heard “serious” people boosting it.

      • Butterphinger@lemmy.zip
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        Like all the “selfhosters” and their Cloudflare proxies lmao.

        just use wireguard. :/

      • teolan@lemmy.world
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        Well they are a serious company with serious engineering capabilities. Just know that whoever runs the control server can control your network, and almost everyone uses Tailscale’s centralised control server, so they control the networks of almost all of their customers. Most of their customers are for internal use by companies which don’t care about relying on SaaS products. But if you self-host for resilience, using Tailscale doesn’t make much sense without also self-hosting the control server through the unofficial headscale implementation.

        • wabasso@lemmy.ca
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          Can you help me understand what head/tail scale do? I’m at the “get friends and family on” stage so I’ve been struggling figuring out how to get friendly domain names working through Wireguard.

          • TunaLobster@lemmy.world
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            Note: I have only done this with Tailscale. I have not looked into this with headscale.

            You can invite them to your network, or share a machine to their network. The second option is probably more likely what you will do with Tailscale since it is unlimited and the first option has a limited number of users for the free tier. The biggest hurdle will be them getting devices added to their tailnet so those devices can access your machine.

            I imagine it’s maybe a little easier with headscale. I haven’t gone down that route yet. I would probably want to have my DDNS point to a VPS and have that be the entry point to my network. I could point it to my ISP IP, but one more layer that isn’t very expensive is probably smarter security wise.

      • clif@lemmy.world
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        Glad to see this comment on the chain. I haven’t tried it myself (yet) but I’ve got a friend that does and says it works great.

        It’s on my list. Unfortunately, it’s a really long list.

  • tjoa@feddit.org
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    I think we should have a system to find and join self-hosted instances from other people. Most of us probably dont mind a few more users since our servers are idling most of the time. And this would not require grandma From Facebook to docker compose….

  • xorollo@leminal.space
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    I tried to set up some services last year and had some trouble getting immich to work through networking. The answer was tailscale. This past Christmas holidays I got nextcloud and immich up. I use nextcloud for my audiobooks and large files I want to keep but not on my phone. Immich for pictures and synching for small files I want synced often like my epub book arks and highlights and Obsidian notes vault.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 个月前

    Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

    Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

    File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

    Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

    I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

    • rmrf@lemmy.ml
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      1 个月前

      I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

      Nextcloud encrypts data e2e, so your point there is misguided and not really relevant. You can’t be compelled to provide a password/decryption key as long as it doesn’t exist as physical evidence. This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints; biometrics, like all physical evidence, can be subpoenad.

      Self hosting services like matrix or email is a bad idea if you don’t really understand what you’re doing, like many other things. If you keep you stuff updated and are intelligent in how you structure your network there’s not really anymore risk here than paying someone else to host it. If you keep you stack simple and follow best practices, code and configurations written by industry experts do most of the heavy lifting.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 个月前

        This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints

        That’s because cops don’t need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you’re talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.

        What I’m talking about is a subpoena where you’re required to present evidence. The fact that it’s encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn’t matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you’re still required to present it to the court.

        If you keep you stuff updated

        Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don’t expect it or don’t have time. When that’s someone’s full time job and they’re updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there’s a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.

        I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

        I hope you’re not anybody’s lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?

  • Ænima@lemmy.zip
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    1 个月前

    Been wondering for a while if it was worth sticking around on this plane of existence. Feeling like nothing was going to get any easier or better, wondering if my life would just be watching horror rafter horror until the tech I loved stop working and the world went dark as they came for me and mine.

    Then I saw Benn Jordan’s Anarchist Gift Guide video and realized the same thing as you: I may not have a lot of skills to offer the world, but I’m neurodivergent, a sysadmin for higher ed, and (used to, at least) like to tinker. I realized my disdain for the humanitarian and moral failings of the system we currently reside in could be married to my hobbies and feel like I was doing something more than just protesting, donating, and waiting to die.

    My goals are to fix up my home environment, get my 3D printers working, set up an exercise area, set up a Meshtastic relay and other support networks for my local area, update a media server for friends and family to enjoy, including a request system, and do anything else along the way the provide a system of communication and sanity that removes as much reliance on the government and corporations as I can.

    It finally got me to fix some bugs in existing services I already manage and this weekend my wife and I are starting the work on the exercise room, for the benefit of our bodies. Not saying Benn’s video saved my life, but it gave me a purpose, again, in a world that feels increasingly aimed at reducing me to a sad data point on some graph. I hate what this world has become and avoid social media at all costs, but now I can do something locally that will feel like I’m doing something to help.

    I have a particular set of skills that make me a nightmare for groups like ICE. I just need coffee, my ADHD meth, and some weed gummies to see it through. Thanks for posting this! I will save it and refer to it as I go.

    • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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      1 个月前

      Prescription meth does wonders for focus. Lol

      I’m riding the same struggle bus and there are a lot of us. More like a struggle cruisliner, or struggle ark. Keep up the fight. I know it’s exhausting, but don’t let the bastards drag you down.