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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.

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What radicalized you? For me it was Spore. (alien.top)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I had to reinstall Onedrive at work. Doing that screwed up so much I spent a total of about 8 hours to get everything working again and 2 more to redo the work that was lost before reinstalling. Now I view anything that I don't control directly as ephemeral.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Isn't that a bit too radical, though? Don't you start feeling like, "if you want to do an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe?"

For me, it's not so much about direct control but that I don't want to lose the option. The way I see it, if a service is built on open standards and is well managed, I don't mind having it run by someone else. But if whatever service you are trying to sell me denies me the option of taking my data and going elsewhere, it's an instant nope for me.