Self-Hosting, Federalism, The Golden Means

07 Mar, 2025

Foreword

This essay contains discussions of poverty and homelessness, including some deeply personal anecdotes. Parts of this essay may be considered "trauma-dumpy."
This warning applies mostly to the sections "Externalities" and "The Long Walk Home."

I wrote this essay in March of 2025, but didn't post it until January 2026. While I still agree with it, there's parts of this I might say differently.
I also recommend Gio's "A Hack Is Not Enough" as a companion to this essay; I agree with it near-wholly and it fills in many of my gaps here.

Intro

Whenever someone talks about data sovereignty and the idea that large platforms are inherently untrustworthy with your data, I heave a big sigh.

Because in theory, they're right. I bear no allegiance to the Googles and the Amazons of the world. I've had things of mine removed from my Google Drive, which I've had since I was in grade school, over copyright violations before. I've watched YouTube wipe out hundreds of kink videos (some purely educational in nature) which had been permitted for years because of a sudden shift to their policies in response to a conspiracy theory (which I personally believe to have been a false flag. IYKYK.) But on the other hand...

The Hand-me-down Kid

I've been a geek for my entire life. Our family went from "comfortable" to "near-constantly imperiled" over the course of the 2000s, largely due to our shared interest in tech, an industry which imploded in Canada when I was a kid. (Not to mention the 2008 recession.) Nevertheless, we kept computers in the house, and while we were a few years late to smartphones, Mom made sure my siblings and I had one as we each entered high school.

I've also been the most private of the three of us. I didn't discuss my interests at length with my family, mostly because a lot of it wasn't really "family-friendly." A discussion on how "outlandish" kinks affect a young person's psychosexual development is out of scope for this article, but suffice it to say that puberty was a wrecker for me, and I gave up trying to be normal by the tenth grade. I felt a particular type of shame, and as a result, I sought to be a Digital Sovereign before I even knew what that meant.

In 2012, this took the shape of opting for a small, cheap netbook instead of piling in for the more powerful desktop my siblings got (and loved to pieces) when my mom pitched the idea to us. I'll never forget that thing, it was an Asus Aspire One, with a rippled top, an Intel Atom which may have even only had one core and ran at barely 1GHz, and a single GB of RAM. It handled every day life OK, but trying to get it to play Minecraft acceptably was an exercise in frustration. (I did play though!)

But I was an autistic barely-teenager with insufficient technical experience to match my passion. When it took too long to do something, I got upset at it, frequently ripping the battery out to force it to reboot. (I hadn't learned that you could just hold the power button to force-reboot; learning this was deeply embarrassing.) Naturally, this caused corruption in my hard drive, causing it to run progressively slower, until one day it didn't turn on anymore.

I was pretty busted up about this as you might imagine. Exploring my interests, writing whatever was on my brain, was good for my mental health. Social media hadn't quite taken over the world yet, but it was on its way there. I sought the power I had in that laptop for a while using online outlets. Google Docs would allow me to write and have it backed up to my Drive automatically. I used this intensely, on computers at school and on the web browser built into my Wii U (which I had no way to break nearly as badly.)

When I was given a hand-me-down desktop a year later as part of a deal I had made to motivate me to get my grades up, I vowed to be more careful with it. No more taking my anger out, no more of the dangerous downloading practices of my early youth. I'd be careful with it.

It was a Pentium D, one of the first dual-core CPUs, and a decade out of date when I got it. But it had a bit more RAM, and a graphics card, a Radeon X550. It was something. Minecraft ran at the potato speeds I was used to, but Skyrim refused to boot. Later we got an HD 5450, and that did play Skyrim, and Minecraft was a bit nicer. But I spent a lot of time with it playing Garry's Mod, doing... Stuff! I'm sure you can imagine what a teenager with DeviantArt-class fetishes would have been doing in a 3d sandbox.

But it was an old, tired machine, and eventually, its CPU fan started to die, causing it to occasionally overheat and shut off. I eventually put it on its side, with a tower fan that had a broken base on top, forcing air through the whole case. It worked well enough, usually. But I'd been using it in bed, since the chair at my desk hurt. I'd built up a habit of keeping a cup of water at my bedside table, so if I got thirsty in the middle of the night I didn't have to get up. Obviously, I didn't want it to spill onto my PC, so I kept it at the side, and kept the PC a bit away from it. But one day, half-asleep, I swiped it, knocking it toward the PC, with enough vigor that the splash killed it on contact.

I was devastated. I had been so careful. But my failure to account for the incremental consequences of my decisions (which I would later come to understand as Normalization of Deviance, a topic I'd like to write on) lead to a state where one mistake sent the house of cards down.

So back to the Wii U it was, with more of the content and data I had accrued washed away in one fell swoop.

My siblings' PC suffered a tragic fate not long after; it simply... died, the cause unknown. (Really, it was my brother's PC; my younger sibling wasn't much of a gamer, and their needs were handled by their iPhone 5S; a gift Mom had saved up a while for, and that they used into the dirt until it started refusing to turn on just a few years ago.)

We sent it off to my grandmother's friend, a professional technician. In the meantime, our cousin offered up his old PC, as he'd upgraded. It was determined that the motherboard had died, and it was going to take a significant sum to get it repaired. Our cousin's PC held its own in the tasks my brother asked of it; it wasn't great, but I have fond memories of watching Kill la Kill with my brother through it.

He had graduated, and after his attempts at becoming an electrician fell through, he got a remote job, which he'd log into with a live CD. He saved up a bit, and eventually paid for its repair. It came back, with a fresh new Gigabyte motherboard that had protections against the failure that had killed the other one. Our cousin's PC was displaced, and for a lack of anywhere else to go, it came to me.

I had learned a lot about computers since then, and taken a class on programming. I knew what I was doing now, and more importantly, what I shouldn't be doing. It was quite slow, but it squeaked by, and older games ran OK. But the HD5450 (the same card I had gotten for the Pentium D machine!) simply wasn't cutting it anymore. With some money I got for my birthday, I bought a GTX 750 off of Kijiji (a Craigslist-type classifieds platform that a lot of Americans haven't heard of despite operating there; hence why I mention it.) With that upgrade, I had all the power I needed at my fingertips. I could play Minecraft in 720p at an actually decent framerate, even with a few mods! Skyrim also ran acceptably. Newer titles like GTA V, which had come out on PC that year, were out of the question still, because of the Athlon 64 X2 that was in the old girl, but I had aspirations to stick a Phenom X3 in there, the fastest its AM2 socket could support.

These dreams were dashed as it started to slowly die as well, either due to overheating or electrical issues. It was given the tower fan treatment as well, but it could only delay the inevitable -- one day I went to go use it, and it just wouldn't start anymore.

My brother let me use his PC occasionally (out of pity mostly,) but this period of deprivation was my shortest. My mom had quit her remote job and picked up a retail position in town, which paid better and was less soul-sucking. The HP i3 desktop the old job gave her sat unused, and while Mom insisted they were going to want it back, after some back and forth, she relented; admitting that I had actually gotten better at caring for my things, and that I was blameless for the failure of my last PC.

This one never broke, but I didn't hang onto it for long either; I just needed something to type on for school. It couldn't fit any discrete graphics, so I stuck to less demanding indie titles, and eventually installed Linux Mint onto it since I wasn't going to be playing many games anyway. In 2016, I came into a bit of money due to an agreement from my youth that would pay out a few times through my early adulthood, and built my first custom gaming PC.

It was incredible; Intel's latest i7-6700K and Nvidia's latest GTX 980 Ti. I was on top of the world. (and then Nvidia dropped the 10 Series literally like a month later but we don't talk about that!) I started playing all the emulators and AAA games I could pirate on our rural internet. I actually bought Minecraft!

Through these three systems, I did maintain my data through each one. But I also started posting way more, and saving things to Google Cloud. I had a similarly rocky experience with phones; one broke entirely due to my actions, a second Just Died one day, all the while an ancient Blackberry Curve that refused to die strung me along. But Google had backed a lot of those up, although the ones I'd saved on the Blackberry were lost when it eventually did die. I eventually collected all my stuff from Google and saved it to my PC; I used it for a couple of years, before losing everything from my entire adolescence, not for any technical reason.

Externalities

I can't go too in-depth as to the reasons we became homeless, because they're part of a story that isn't mine, but I can give the broad strokes. The summer after I built that PC, my mom's now-ex-husband moved in with us, and we all moved into the city, in search of better opportunities and a better life. I hadn't finished high school; I had lost several credits due to mental illness and left with the intention of joining an adult education program to get caught up; this never materialized. I worked for a few months, but it never worked out. The two of them had earned quite a bit of money trading cryptocurrency, but in the Ethereum flash-crash of 2017, we lost most of it. Many desperate strokes were made, but after what Mom had managed to save was stolen, weeks before Christmas, it was over. We were evicted January 2018. And thus begins the most tumultuous period of my entire life.

We tried to patch up relationships with extended family, who didn't like Mom's partner. It didn't work. We spent time bumping from AirBNB to AirBNB for several months, and every time, I hauled my desktop with me. The second of my settlement payments came in, and I paid first and last months' rent for an apartment, which took some finding, but we did find it. I also bought a new computer; a laptop, with a 7th gen i7 and a 1060; so we put my desktop into storage on my grandmother's old property. I moved most of my photos and other sensitive things into Google Drive, if I hadn't posted them to Facebook already (it was cool at the time, OK!), but I had a lot of projects I was working on on the hard drive, to distract myself. But it was alright; we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I'd get it back eventually.

It took longer than expected to return to that property. When we did return, we found most of my belongings -- but my desktop and its monitor were missing. To this day, we never found out what happened to it. I have some ideas, but again... that's not my story.

What I do know is that with that desktop, I had lost almost my entire adolescence. Anything I didn't trust Google with was just gone. I was optimistic that this time, I could make it work. I was an adult now, I could handle my own data. But I couldn't. Because I didn't have control of my own life.

I would become homeless again less than a year after, in slow, torturous strokes, as my family situation degraded and dissolved. The small but cozy 3-bedroom we had turned into a 1-bedroom, with my mom in the main room, my sibling in the bedroom (more than legally required as they were a minor, it was also the kindest thing to do), and me in a vanity, where two of my walls were doors and a third was a window; I had about a foot of room between my bed and the farthest wall (door.) But I was alright; I had my laptop, as well as my brother's old desktop, left with us after he decided to stay with my grandmother, whose beliefs left her fundamentally incompatible with me, in ways I couldn't just "go along to get along" my way through. We thought it was dead, but it wasn't; just needed a new power supply. I taught myself more about Linux and basic sysadmin on it. Ran a Minecraft server for some friends. Kept working on projects. It was tight, but kinda nice. I have as many good memories of that time as bad ones. Probably more. That desktop would come into more frequent use, as my gaming laptop started to malfunction, needing replacement of (thankfully inexpensive) parts to stay afloat.

As the situation degraded further, and Mom's relationship became untenable, I also managed to lose most of my friends, the viability of my Internet presence, and my sense of privacy, all through multiple acts of outright malice. I developed a great deal of trauma from all the chaos, and I started disconnecting from reality more and more. When we lost that apartment, my mom and sibling stayed with a friend; but he had decided, for some reason, that he didn't want me with them. I spent more time in some AirBNBs (and a weekend with an old friend from grade school) before Mom found me something; a room rental... which lasted a week. (We suspect they may have been running a rent scam.) My grandmother (who bought the frankly-bullshit reasons they gave for kicking me out) picked up me and my stuff to take me to Mom, who failed to answer the door. Grandma told me that her (Mom's) roommate still wasn't going to let me stay. So I had two choices; let myself be abused by my grandmother, or be well and truly homeless.

Easy choice.

I walked out of that driveway with a middle finger up.

Grandma and I would make peace later on. She passed away last year. But that's not what this story is about.

The Long Walk Home

I had researched a youth shelter before, and reached out to them when it was looking like we were going to lose that apartment. I wanted to have a contingency plan. They said they'd gladly take me if it came to it, and they'd allow me (as a nonbinary person then identifying as a woman) to pick which I felt more comfortable sharing space with.

After the confrontation in the driveway, I walked directly to the library, neither passed GO nor collected $200, and messaged them; they confirmed they had a spot, so there I went. I hadn't brought my bags with me which contained my laptop; they let me use the computer there until bedtime so I could get back online, message my mom and my partner. They left me alone in the computer room, and for the first time in two years, I cried.

The folks at the shelter were absolutely lovely, and I owe them my continued existence. It was closed during the day (except for when the weather presented a health risk, which in the hottest parts of the summer, it did!) so I spent a lot of time at the library. Played a lot of Minecraft. Neither made nor saved very much stuff. Spent some time mentally recovering. Signed up for government assistance, was accepted, and exempted from the usual programs you'd have to attend because of my mental illness. I did however see a social worker to try and find me somewhere to live. It took some doing, but we got there, and after a few months, I was in an apartment I had found and acquired (almost!) entirely myself.

The first few months were great. Autumn was in the air, my favourite season, I had another settlement payment coming up ("income the month you get it and an asset thereafter", said my case worker), I had privacy again. I saw my psychiatrist, signed up for disability support, and was approved, where a lot of people have to fight for much longer. Unusual for a purely psychiatric case.

My laptop fan started to die, and when I tried to replace it, my screwdriver slipped, cracking the motherboard, killing it. But I got a desktop from a roommate, which came from an old print shop, so it worked as a backup. My partner's family, beautiful humans they are, agreed to lend me some money for a new laptop, which I paid back with my next settlement cheque.

When that came in, I got a phone, moved into a bigger room in the same house. Spent three years trying to make a name for myself somehow. Nothing worked. I needed specialist care for my mental illness, which never materialized. It was disheartening, I'll tell you. I churned through friend groups, and it became hard to look through my photos, although I kept an archive of stuff from my last two laptops. The experience of going through that archive is half the reason I'm writing this right now.

That laptop slowly started to fall apart too, although it stabilized after all the rear ports died, and remained usable.

...And then one day, a monitor fell on it.

See, I had taken to playing some rhythm games which used a vertical orientation. I used a second monitor for this which I got from Mom, it was ages old and the LCD had some bruises but it worked. But it didn't have a mount that could rotate, so I put it in an armoire in my room, balancing inside a drawer. It worked fine, up until I was struggling with the cables one day, it tilted over, and scored a direct hit on my laptop's display, breaking it.

The HDMI port still worked, so I could still use the laptop like a desktop. It was a bit flaky, but fine.

I reconnected with my mom, and spent some time with her and my sibling now and then. One visit, after the display incident, I went to plug the laptop into the TV there, and.... nothing. We tried different ports, different cables. Nothing. The last viable way to use the laptop had just disappeared.

A word of gratitude to the friends who managed to put together for a ThinkPad T430, ordered used from a Goodwill online retailer, on short notice. When I got back home, I used that old desktop, but electrical issues in its USB controller were killing things that were plugged into it, and causing it to short and shut off. When it killed a guitar interface, that's how I knew it wasn't safe to keep using. So the ThinkPad came very handy. I also obtained a Seagate Game Drive from a pawn shop, which I used to collect my data together in one spot. It wasn't great, the cable was flaky, but it held together, and I could use it either on my desktop or my ThinkPad. It was also helpful for getting all the data off my old laptop, whose 2TB drive couldn't be backed up onto either.

In the background, roommates came and went, the ones I liked being replaced with ones I was OK with, replaced with ones I really didn't like. Landlord started becoming more distant, and over the next three years, things eventually became violent with me and one of my roommates.

When my last settlement cheque came, I spent the week with Mom, to get out of the house and build a new desktop PC. That week turned into two weeks, turned into a month. Her roommate didn't spend much time in the house, and the time he was here, we were pleasant. We eventually got around to being like "hey, has been here for the last month and change, and you haven't really noticed. They can pay rent for themself now too." Roommate relented, and I got my things out of the old place. I've been here ever since.

So I moved into this place, and I moved into my new PC at the same time. Part of that was getting the data from my old Seagate hard drive.

...You know, there's one piece of advice that data hoarders frequently repeat to each other. And that's "never buy Seagate."

Half of that drive never came off. The sectors were corrupted to shit. Most of it was recoverable, and some of the rest was retrievable stuff, but there's a lot of content on that hard drive that's a total loss. It was my biggest loss of data since my first custom PC was stolen.

The Time of Monsters

I've often lived with one eye on my back. I wasn't a popular kid, if you can imagine. I'm not a popular adult now. We moved a lot, usually for financial reasons. I had a hard time building an identity for myself -- even today, my identity is incredibly fluid. I've been so many things at different times, rarely ever for myself.

One's data is a record of who they are, where they've been (broadly speaking) and what they're like. When data is lost, it feels like losing a part of yourself.

Advocates of self-hosting will point to the censorious nature of corporate entities, gleefully burning down the Libraries of Alexandria if they think it'll please the shareholders. And I tend to agree. You should never trust any individual entity with your stuff.

But for a lot of us? We don't have a better option.

So few people even have desktop computers anymore, more of the ones who do are gamers, and video games take up frankly hilarious amounts of space these days. PCs went from being appliances, something you had because it's what you needed, to being a luxury item, or something you use for work.

In recent years, luxuries have become cheap, and essentials have become expensive. Jobs have gone from something you need to have, to something graciously offered to you in exchange for months of your life spent waiting, and terminated with little warning. The result of this is that in the West, we live decadent, but extremely unstable lives. There's a term for this newly expanding class: precariat.

But the entertainment and technology industries can't have that; a public who can't afford their products is a public that can't enrich them. The result of this is enshittification, usually, or the development of subscription-based services. A user might not be able to put down hundreds of dollars for network-attached storage, but they can afford $20-30 a month for a couple terabytes of cloud storage. And $20 over a million people is, like, 20 million bucks! (Even more if you can double-dip and sell that information to data brokers! But surely nobody's that evil right haha :) )

Everything's a subscription service now, and I hate it. You can't keep up on movies and "TV" without Netflix. You can't keep up on anime without Crunchyroll. You can't keep up on music without Spotify. You can't keep a handle on your entire history without Google Drive or Dropbox or iCloud. These pepper your bank account, nickel and diming you until nothing you have is worth anything to you, because you could lose it at any moment. You cling to what you have left and you're thankful for it, because humans will get used to anything, right? As people become less financially able to make things, genAI¹ goes from being the cachet of weird nerds to something paraded around to inject a little bit of colour into people's lives - for a small monthly fee, of course! It's absurd, and there's no escaping it. Nobody my age has got any savings, any prospects, or any hope. Immiserating doesn't even begin.

It's tempting, then, to produce self-hosting and data hoarding as a solution; but in doing so, we overlook that administration is a full-time job. Tech literacy has little to do with it; anybody who will sit and read documentation for enough time can figure out how to set up a Jellyfin server. But to do this on your personal computer involves a commitment to the state of your personal computer. If anything happens to it, you've wasted a bunch of time. You could buy a little server box to do this stuff in, but that's even more time that you could end up wasting.

The average person is not stupid. The average person is mentally overloaded and mainlining stress-adrenaline to keep themselves from keeling over. They literally don't have the time in the day to learn, and they don't have the time in the day to worry about things like this.

I saw flashes of the Old Days of the Internet. Things went missing all the time. There is an immense amount of lost media that people don't even think about that wasn't present on sites like MySpace that went defunct, but were stored in small platforms owned by individuals that went defunct or had major technical failures. One of the forums I trawled as a teenager was ashes overnight because the admin ran it out of their basement, and a pipe leaked all over the server. Another one was hacked one day and wiped off the face of the Earth. The true scale of the landmass of Alexandria is incomprehensible.

People don't hold onto their own stuff not because they're lazy or stupid, it's because in a world with so much at stake constantly, not having to be responsible for one's own data is a little bit of peace of mind. To most people, the risk of having their data sold is worth it. And that's why it keeps happening.

True "individual digital sovereignty" was a luxury in the 2000s, and it's a myth in the late capitalist hellscape that we currently live in.

So what the fuck do we do about this?

Federalism

Federalists believe in a flat social topology, wherein the responsibilities of each individual is small, and the concentration of power is minimal. In terms of computer systems, the closest analogy is a distributed network.

Decentralization and distribution are not the same thing; decentralization allows "nodes" of high power concentration to form; a failure of one of these nodes is not usually catastrophic, but often pretty lossy. If you were there in the early days of the Mastodon federated platform, you'll remember being in a small instance dedicated to a specific topic that gets too many people and has to shut down. Indeed, of four instances I've been part of since 2017, not a single one is still active. (NOTE: Apparently the number of instances I was active in was five! But only ONE of those is active as of editing this essay.)

One individual person cannot be trusted with power over a large number of people, and one individual person cannot be trusted with an archive bigger than they need. The only option is to allow for an easy exit.

Luckily, in torrenting, we've had a great solution for distributing data. In an ideal world, where everyone has unmetered Internet, anything that isn't personally identifying would be available on torrent networks, but that's not really the world we live in.

Still, I think it's valuable for everyone today to know how to use a torrent client, download whatever they can, and share it. Every person with a copy of that obscure album by that artist you love is one more person who can ensure it can never be lost.

Torrenting isn't a complete solution. There are still so many things we use subscription services for that torrenting doesn't help with. Your phone can't hold your whole music library.

The common recommendation is to self-host.

Self-hosting refers to using an open-source service which is built to replicate the functionality of a subscription service, which runs on the user's own hardware. There are meta-search engines (which aggregate results from many providers,) social media proxies (and platforms if you include things like Mastodon!), image hosting services, streaming platforms, blog platforms, all of which can be self-hosted.

Self-hosting is great, but it runs into a similar issue as holding onto all of your own data; you're responsible for administering those services, and they're tied to the state of your hardware. If your desktop kicks the bucket, your services go with them. And sure you can use Docker and Git to run your services and sync configurations, but if you've never used Docker before, let me tell you that there's a reason most non-nerds will never touch Docker with full hazmat on.

Self-hosting is great, I find it to be a lot of fun, but it's never replacing Spotify for most people. And it's not like you can easily distribute this kind of thing, since it's a non-trivial amount of compute and storage. Kodi, back in the day, was the pirate's media server of choice; it ran as an app so no need to configure a server, it could connect to network storage, and plugins existed that let you stream content directly from a torrent network. That shit was fuckin cash. The last time I checked, there wasn't a good way of using such a plugin anymore, but like I'm sure people still use Kodi for stuff.

The notion of distributed compute is an enticing one. We've done it for several things -- cryptocurrency is of course the most obvious one, but also projects like Folding@home in which thousands of nerds across the globe volunteered their spare C/GPU cycles to biology research.

There is so much compute power out in the world not being utilized to its full potential. Imagine a world where torrent streaming is the norm (subject to similar limits as private trackers, which I grant limits the appeal somewhat in regions like I live in where shitty upload speed is typical.)

It isn't really feasible for the average person to self-host every service they use, or manage all of their data if they have a lot of it. But with enough people thinking about how people can help each other, rather than being the "just use Linux" guys, maybe we won't have to some day.

Patches and Fixes

But all of this is a patch on the problem, right? We're suggesting technological solutions to what is fundamentally a social problem. It seems a little bit ridiculous, doesn't it? It'd be cool as hell to pull off, no doubt, but it wouldn't change the fact that the cost of living is continuing to go up.

But maybe that's all we can do, is patch. Make suggestions to people that probably won't work, because sometimes all someone needs to make a positive change in their life is to be reminded that they can. Pile on so many Docker containers it'd make the Ever Given blush. Hoard and self-host everything we can, take back as much of our lives as we can. Rent VPSes for lighthouses because so many people don't have accesses to their routers. Install Tailscale. (I'm actually all for that one.)

The point of all this rambling, if indeed there is one, is this.

I'm all for digital independence wherever you can get it. I only use Linux anymore, I've been offloading my images off of Google Photos and have been considering deleting my old Facebook accounts since, what, 2022? Corporations are not your friends, and you should minimize the amount of trust you put in any one, because they will 100% survive your wrath.

But while the system we live in has blood left to draw from the stone, nerds could be less quick to judge someone spending a bit of money per month to avoid losing those reminders of their identity in a world that would rather they not have any, to have someone else do the work of maintaining their stuff, instead of spending larger up-front sums and more of the limited time their life gives them keeping their own archives.

In the absurd society of today, all we can do is dream and cope. Same as it ever was. Water flowing underground.

I'm going to bed now.

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