I just like the ring of these two words. Like civil disobedience against opression… I consider self hosting to be the epitome of these actions, in the context of global corporations “ruining” every “product” (be it: privacy concerns, data brokers, pushing AI into products, etc.) Hence, the concept that arises when these two words come together: Cybernetical Disobedience, is the greatest motivation (imho) to spin up some containers, be it searxng, vaultwarden, syncthing, or arr stack. All comes with some rebellious ideation behind… Do any of you feel like me?
These are my opinions. There are many like them, but these are mine.
I believe in, and practice privacy, security, and anonymity in every facet of my life that I can. Selfhosting fits in with that just nicely. However, I am very realistic about the whole thing. You are never going to take down Google, Amazon, Microsoft, AI, et al. The best you can do is disconnect from them. However, in the case of Google specifically, that’s a very tall order. The amount of domains and subdomains they run will blow your mind. Almost daily I find yet another one to block. Which makes the likelihood very high that you will encounter one that isn’t in your blocklist, or what have you. Same for Microsoft, same for Amazon, same for all of them. So, to me, chest beating about taking down ‘corpos’ as is usually the jargon, is kind of useless. Oh, it makes us feel good, but in the grand scheme of things, it does little. I would say the percentage of privacy minded individuals that actually practice it, and the percentage of selfhosters is very slim when you consider there are 8.4 billion people on this planet.
Additionally, I hear people saying ‘I run this or that federated’, or whatever ‘…and that can’t be taken down’. That’s a false sense of security to me. Everything can be taken down and a moment’s notice, even the internet. I’m not saying capitulate or rage quit. Again, I’m just very pragmatic and realistic about life in general.
Yeah, I’m aiming for self sufficiency and to reduce as much as I can.
Obviously on the internet you’re not never self sufficient, but liberating my data, owning my domain, and avoiding subscriptions is good.
Absolutely agree 100%. Self sufficiency is something I have diligently worked on to achieve in my life. Not only in the digital sphere, but in my daily life as well.