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?
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.
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.
It’s maybe very radical in worldview, but not in action. I still use stuff like netflix, spotify and youtube instead of downloading everything and share files through cloud storage, I just view it as something I can enjoy/use now that might not be around in the future. If I really want to keep something, the only things I can trust are myself and FOSS.