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?
For me, the constant outrage and fear that newsnews outlets produce turned me into a minor doomsday pepper. I’m mostly prepared for a natural disaster. But that hobby kept growing. I started to become a data hoarder. Lots of books, movies, etc.
The next step was the shift from physical media to streaming services. I started to feel like my ability to have access to media without the internet was dwindling and thus I invested in a NAS.
Then I started to get fascinated by psychedelic assisted therapy. Because of the nature of my job, I felt like I needed to increase my privacy because of the things I was looking into. I haven’t yet taken the step to fully host all my chat apps and what not, but I’m in this phase now. Right now, the extent of my “privacy centric” actions extends to just Signal and a VPN.
Do you have a faraday cage? Honestly that’s probably the first thing I would do if I was a prepped, put a ton of technical manuals and textbooks on a hard drive and stick it in there.