the future is self hosting. with hosting nearly all services that i need you will reduce your online footprint and increase privacy by high margins, privacy and online safety is not just for billionaires.
instead of using steam use local emulation + roms. (cemu, znes, mupen64, 3ds, dolphin, ryujiux)
instead of streaming youtube use local hosting + ytdlp or youtube-dl streaming over fiber from your 320tb nas/hotswaps.
instead of netflix and streaming providers use local self hosting and stream drm free media nas from a drive bank over fiber.
instead of cloud data storage use local bulk data self hosting with remote secure access. (secure ssh + sftp access wrapped in wireguard)
instead of gmail use self hosted email servers or external mail vps or use protonmail.
instead of discord use self hosting services or vps for linked social media. (self hosting voip + secure chat + secure video) you can do it all.
instead of using ring use self hosted video and home surveillance
instead of using remote ai, you can self host 70b/100b models on local hardware and reduce the use of external services like openai
instead of software as a service(SaaS) complete foss software stack on local hardware
instead of using vscode you can use codeblocks ide and vs code oss
instead of photo software gallery online you can self host your photos with foss software
with ecc and rsa cryptographic user auth its IMPOSSIBLE for a user to imposter another user without private keys. its also extremely hard to publicly disclose personal or private information like irl identity (but not impossible just very very hard) or decrypt past user messages. your online cross section almost does not exist besides the fact the network is in use and the traffic is just wireguard/openvpn or a youtube tls connection. you never have to worry about someone going though twitter or facebook posts looking for offensive posts to get a user "canceled" irl since all messages are on self hosted systems with perfect forward secrecy. its beyond going dark online but about being invisible since you never use social media beyond youtube for watching videos passively.
the tradeoffs are worth all the effort to get these systems running:
i can access youtube channels that are deleted since i have a local copy.
i can access videos that are drm free and are future proof.
decentralized independence since i host everything.
security via cryptography not trust means "doxing" wont happen since i can rotate identities.
full stack encryption and data control so OSINT exposure is very small.
cost: since the hardware is always paid in cash the uptime cost is very low.
once the systems are up and running it just runs in the back ground....
i can fully insulate myself from the toxic people on facebook / twitter / tiktok. the methods work
