self hosting and alternative frontends for limited digital autonomy

2024-08-26

  1. Introduction
  2. How I went about it
    1. hosting myself
    2. using alternatives hosted by trusted entities host
  3. downsides
  4. conclusion

In this post I will only advocate, not make a tutorial on anything.

Introduction

Digital autonomy for me means being in charge of the services I use. At some point I’ve felt like I am over-relying on others – mostly big cooperations – to take care of the tools that I use throughout the day. Initially that didn’t feel “wrong” – and it’s still what the average person does – but over the time I’ve gotten more and more uncomfortable with that reality.

It ended up feeling like a loss of control and not even for any good reason other than a bit of convenience.

Looking at it from an utilitarian perspective it appears like you need to weigh the convenience and ease of use against autonomy, privacy and control. The weight of these individual points you have to declare yourself to find out what the decision should be, but for me it weighted heavily towards the “I need to get rid of some systems I can’t control” side.

Making that decision brought me to a solution, just hosting the things I want to use myself, or use it hosted by a trusted entity that at least doesn’t have a business-model based on user data.

How I went about it

hosting myself

Thinking about what to get rid off and what to replace it with is not a very straightforward path. Thus it makes sense to categorice tools, services and the amount of downsides they get you.

I reasoned that I should replace google first, as it has a brilliantly crafted system for violating my privacy. To replace it I then choose searXNG which I’ve been able to host on a raspberry pi with a docker very easily without needing any understanding of what I do there technically.

That served as a good first start. Then I still used onedrive as personal cloud storage to store data, iCloud to keep all my photos and many other smaller tools that are not worth mentioning here.

To get rid of onedrive I always had nextcloud in the back of my mind. I was never using any other part of the microsoft suite and that way I could use nextcloud and onedrive interexchangeably.

Similar with iCloud, I could’ve used nextcloud’s inbuilt gallery feature to replace it, but I’ve not heard good things about it’s usability. And for me switching to an option that is more free does not mean that I want to use a worse alternative to the service I’ve been using previously.

Luckily there is the “Self-hosted photo and video management solution” Immich around. They basically offer a no compromise alternative to iCloud and google photos with the upside of being completely within my control, on a raspberry pi in the basement.

Just following the protocol of checking what alternatives are out there, seeing if I can easily host them and slowly picking up how a e.g. docker or server administration works helped. But there were still things left where I rather trusted others than myself.

using alternatives hosted by trusted entities host

When I host services for myself I do it locally[1], but that means that nobody outside of my private network can access it and me neither when I’m on the go without VPN. But there’s one big upside to it, I don’t have to think about security a tiny bit, because as long as nobody is able to intrude my home network, then it is in no easy way vulnerable.

But luckily there are not just people like me around and instead also some with more expertice money and donations[2] for bigger virtual private servers (VPSs), able to host the service for a lot of people. And doing all that publicly accessible.

Let me take invidious as an example, it is a open source, privacy respecting alternative frontend for youtube. That means it only supplies the content without the trackers and algorithms.

Here is a list of the current instances: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/.

You can find there some instances located throuhout different countries, my favourite currently being inv.tux.pizza.

Such services exist for a bgi variety of other tools too but that’s just to examplify the process.

You can trust others just to a certain extend, but I’d trust a privacy advocate any day of the week more than a company that is trying to make a profit.

Some of these hosts include:

downsides

Wanting to be fully in control of services I use myself opened up a few problems.

Most likely, you will never achieve any true [digital] autonomy because there are just too many highly complicated cogs running the system and you have only a lifespan to try to understand those, and at that point, you rather touch some grass.

That said, there still is a use in going as autonomic as you can or feel comfortable with.

It’ll probably be helpful for your privacy and mind if you just exchange youtube with invidious and reddit with redlib if you insist on using it for sake of getting rid of personalised algorithms alone[3], but that’s a topic for another day.

conclusion

  1. Try to replace services you don’t trust with privacy respecting frontends.
  2. Check out what of these services you can host yourself.
  3. Contribute to the projects by contributing, donating or just saying thanks.

  1. Locally as in hosted at home, not accessible outside of the local network. That means I can only access or upload data when I’m either at home or connected with the home network e.g. with wireguard. ↩

  2. Highly recommend reaching out to those people and thanking for it that they see any gratitude for the good work they do. And if you’re using their services and are able to, to donate. I always do that when I have some dollars worth of monero left and can’t do anything useful with that anyhow, other than donating. ↩

  3. Topic for another day, concerning the book “How Algorithms flatten Culture”. ↩