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Over the last few months, I've grown to despise the way most people now interact with computers. A typical person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/19190975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
You get the idea.
Each service we use that's operated by someone other than ourselves is another point of failure in our lives. Each of these corporations is handling staggeringly large amounts of personal data. When (not if) these companies go belly-up, they inevitably will take peoples' online lives with them. I think it's clear to see that these are horrible companies, to be avoided at all cost. But what's the alternative?
Enter FOSS[0]. Over the past 30ish years, millions of man-hours have been put into creating an ecosystem of open-source[1] tools. It's feasible to run a daily-driver computer with 100% free software. But why stop there? There are open-source self-hostable solutions for practically all of these.
A quick overview, only including what I was able to set up within 20
days:
Surprisingly enough, the last one took the most time, since I opted to use wersh instead of a more "normal" framework. I'm rather proud of where I ended up, check out the code if you're curious!
While setting these up took some time, it's a fixed time-sink, with a low maintenance cost. If you'd like to migrate off of any of these services but don't have the technical experience, send me an email at ecs@d2evs.net!
[0]: Free and Open-Source Software. Loosely, this is where programmers make the secret sauce that powers their programs tick publicly available. Even better, they take contributions!
[1]: I use the terms "FOSS", "free software", and "open-source" interchangeably. Some people don't, and that's a topic for another day.