The internet was sold as convenience. Too often, it became dependence: a licence instead of a purchase, a login instead of a shelf, and a remote switch someone else controls.
This is a small, practical space for digital ownership, preservation, privacy and self-hosting — without making life unnecessarily complicated.
What this site is for#
This site is about choosing where technology should live and who should control it. I document practical self-hosting, local copies, privacy, backups and digital preservation — while being honest about the services I deliberately leave hosted.
Self-hosting is not a badge of honour and it is not the answer to every problem. I use it where local control, resilience or privacy is worth the maintenance. I do not self-host complexity for its own sake. Email is a good example: reliable delivery, reputation, filtering, authentication, security and recovery are too much operational work for the benefit I would gain.
The useful question is not “Can this be self-hosted?” It is “Does running it myself give me enough control to justify the work, and can I leave later without losing my data?”
The principle#
Keep it simple. Keep it local. Keep a copy.
Piracy is often discussed as a legal or moral issue. It is also a symptom of broken access: delisted films, disappearing software, disabled hardware, region locks and products that stop working when a company changes its mind. This site is about understanding that problem and building resilient, lawful alternatives where possible.
Start here#
What this site is not#
This is not a place for piracy links, stolen material, circumvention instructions or commercial infringement. It is a place to think clearly about ownership, preservation, interoperability and control — and to share straightforward ways to reduce dependence on platforms.
Practical notes on digital ownership, privacy, self-hosting and preservation. Keep it simple. Keep it local. Keep a copy.
A copy of a file is not automatically a backup, and a backup is not automatically a preservation system. Self-hosting becomes much easier to reason about when these three jobs are kept separate.
Synchronisation keeps copies convenient Synchronisation keeps data available on more than one device. Syncthing is useful for this kind of direct device synchronisation, and it makes working files available where I need them.
But synchronisation also copies mistakes. If a file is deleted, corrupted or encrypted, that change may travel to the other copy. Synchronisation improves availability; it does not replace a backup.
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Self-hosting is often presented as an answer to every problem. I do not think it is.
A service can be open source, privacy-friendly and technically interesting while still being the wrong thing for me to operate. Every service adds updates, storage, monitoring, backups, permissions and another failure mode. The aim is not to recreate every cloud product at home. The aim is to keep control where control is valuable without turning the homelab into a second job.
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Self-hosting is becoming more interesting for a reason that has little to do with fashionable infrastructure. People are discovering that services they relied on can become worse while they are still using them.
Features disappear. Prices change. Limits arrive. Advertising takes over. A product that began as useful becomes harder to use, less private or dependent on an account that can be closed.
Cory Doctorow calls this process enshittification. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he argues that platforms can first attract users with convenience, then lock in users and businesses before shifting value away from both groups.1 The Creative Salon article supplied alongside this book is another useful reference point for the discussion.2
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A useful project is not automatically worth adding just because it is new, popular or active on GitHub. I look for a clear problem, sensible deployment, useful documentation, a workable backup path and enough maintenance history to justify the time spent learning it.
This list deliberately excludes tools already used here, including Beszel, Dockhand and youtube-dl workflows. Karakeep is also excluded as a recommendation because it is already in use and has proved to be good in practice.
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A resilient archive starts with the things you would genuinely miss. Do not begin by downloading everything. Begin with an inventory.
The KISS version Keep the original files where possible. Use common formats such as PDF, FLAC, MP4 and JPEG. Keep one working copy and at least one backup. Store a second backup somewhere different. Check that backups can actually be opened. Review the setup once or twice a year. Preservation is not about collecting for its own sake. It is about keeping reasonable access to things you bought, created or were given permission to keep.
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Self-hosting does not have to mean building a data centre. Start with one service that solves a real problem: a media library, photo backup, password manager or notes system.
Keep the design boring:
Use hardware you already own. Run one service at a time. Keep application data separate from the operating system. Back up configuration and irreplaceable files. Test restoring something before you need it. Use friendly local names and HTTPS. Document the few commands that matter. The goal is not to replace every cloud service. The goal is to make sure a company closing an account does not erase your only copy of your life.
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A disc on a shelf is not perfect, but it is understandable. A digital item tied to an account, region, server or changing licence is different: you may have paid for access without receiving lasting control.
Sony removing or restricting access to disc-related features is a useful reminder of the wider trend. Hardware, software and media can be changed after purchase, delisted from stores, or made dependent on services that may not exist forever.
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