Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Self-Host — a technical curiosity became a practical choice about ownership, privacy, learning and keeping data in systems I control.
It is slightly ridiculous that one line can connect watching anime on Veoh around 2007 with running Docker containers on a mini PC in my house today.
But there is a line.
Back then, I was interested in one thing: finding something I wanted to watch.
Today I am interested in something slightly different: keeping control of how I watch it.
The old hunt #
In the mid-to-late 2000s, discovering media online was messy.
I remember Veoh. I remember Justin.tv. I remember searching around for anime because British television only showed a tiny fraction of what existed.
You followed links, recommendations and discussions.
Quality wasn’t guaranteed.
Availability definitely wasn’t guaranteed.
Availability and permission were not the same thing, and broken links were only part of the uncertainty. But for somebody who had previously depended on television schedules, the internet felt unlimited.
Then streaming became normal #
Eventually the strange collection of websites was replaced by something much more professional.
Streaming became an ordinary consumer product.
That was brilliant.
You no longer needed to hunt around the web. Install an app, pay a subscription, press play.
For a while it felt as though media had been solved.
Then the subscriptions multiplied.
Libraries changed.
Shows moved.
Things disappeared.
The convenience remained, but the sense that a particular service was a permanent library started to fade.
Building my own small library #
My answer wasn’t to abandon streaming.
It was to make sure I also had a way to organise and watch media I controlled and had obtained from lawful sources.
That eventually led to a self-hosted media setup.
Jellyfin became part of my homelab, giving those files a library I could organise without tying them to one streaming account.
The technology is obviously completely different from the web I used in 2007.
The feeling, strangely, is familiar.
I decide what is there.
I decide how it is organised.
I decide which device can access it.
If I change the server, I can move the ordinary media files, metadata and backed-up configuration with me.
Ownership changes the experience #
There is a difference between having access to something and having it.
Streaming has trained us to blur those two ideas.
A title can appear in your watchlist for months and then vanish because a licensing agreement changed.
That is not necessarily unreasonable. It is simply the nature of the product.
A personal library works differently.
You become responsible for storage, organisation, backups and playback.
That responsibility is inconvenient.
It is also reassuring.
The technology became part of the hobby #
The funniest part is that the infrastructure is now nearly as interesting to me as the media.
The implementation matters less than keeping the files and metadata portable, but learning how the pieces fit together became part of the enjoyment.
None of that helps me understand the ending of a film.
But building it scratches the same curiosity that made me explore strange corners of the web years ago.
The circle closed #
Teenage me wanted the internet to show me more than television could.
Adult me wants to keep some of that media in a system I understand and control.
In between those two points, the internet went from being a collection of places I explored to a collection of services I subscribed to.
Self-hosting has brought a little of the old feeling back.
Not the broken links.
I am happy to leave those in 2007.