I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground. That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car. Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we’re all running in our homelabs. Here’s what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting. Every service you don’t self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It’s baked into the infrastructure. Individual privacy is a losing game. You can’t opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here’s what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn’t feed their systems at all. When you run Nextcloud, you’re not just protecting your files from Google - you’re creating a node in a network they can’t access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren’t sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren’t being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE. I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That’s when I realized: we can’t rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own. This isn’t about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:
Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control
File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing
Passwords that aren’t in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass
Media that doesn’t feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea
Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger. Where to start if you’re new:
Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation. Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft. Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust. Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.
If you’re already self-hosting:
Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.
The goal isn’t purity. You’re probably still going to use some corporate services. That’s fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there’s a network that can’t be dismantled by a single executive order. I’m working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it’ll be profitable, but because I’ve realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure. We’re not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we’re building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that’s a node in a system they can’t control. They want us to be data points. Let’s refuse.
What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?
EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I’m just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think “rule of three” sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.
More importantly, a few people asked about a “0 to 100” guide - or even just “0 to 50” for those who don’t want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my “Where to start” list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:
The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It’s appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.
The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.
The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.
I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.
Dude like even 6 months ago Id read your post and would think alright man c’mon…
But now you are 100% right it’s getting tough and people will only realize when it’s too late. Imagine a far right government with palantir in Europe. That’s pretty much where we are heading and I try my best to get any of my data away from this sphere of influence
It’s not often I hear meet others on the same page, but I too see self-hosting as a form of resistance against corporate control and surveillance capitalism. Rather than trying to bring self-hosting to individuals, I’ve steered my efforts towards affecting technological change in groups and organizations instead. While this narrows the pool of those who can set up sovereign infrastructure, it gets more people using the open-source alternatives as part of their collaborative work.
To support that, I’m building out such an IT reference architecture for nonprofits, activist groups, and communities. The networking model is such that services can be hosted on cheap hardware and accessed through Wireguard tunnels managed by Netbird (and experimenting with Pangolin now). This keeps the servers under positive control of the data owners and uses only one or two VPS instances to handle proxying and accesses. Now, every organization’s requirements are different, but this baseline is meant to be a flexible proof-of-concept that can be adapted to their unique threat model. For example, an org can opt for just using a cloud-hosted service for certain components if the self-hosting burden is too great and their threat model determines it to acceptable.
The docs are here at https://sts.libretechnica.org/ and the source for the docs and all the Ansible playbooks are at https://gitlab.com/libretechnica/SovereignTechStack/. I invite anyone to contribute, analyze, pick-apart, improve this model. In fact, I’m specifically seeking thoughts on whether this reference model can adequately address the risks and threats that self-hosters face.
This is the first time I’m sharing this publicly; I was inspired by this post to finally spread awareness of the project and get more like-minded people involved.
P.S. @h333d Sorry about the people who think your post is gen-AI. I used to proofread stuff all day long before the advent of LLMs, so I quickly recognize artificial text and yours reads nothing like it. I appreciate the time you took to write your post and it was a refreshing read.
Thank you for this post!
For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.
I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.
It’s not just media that doesn’t feed recommendation algorithms - I actually like recommendation algorithms (Jellyseerr does a pretty great job with this), it’s more about having control over my media and it not being taken away randomly. So many times an older show I would want to watch would no longer be “available” so I’d have to download it anyway, with no option of paying to watch for it.
Thank you!
This is almost exactly my motivation when I recently started my homelab journey. A bit of privacy, but what pushed me over the edge is that I was supporting these anti-social corporations with my money or data, when they went fully mask-off.
Always has been.
Even if you like who’s in charge right now, they could change how they act or they could be replaced.
They could shut us down or do a lot of things, but it’s harder to break 10,000 servers than one.
On the one hand I do support the existence of open-source self-hostable alternatives to surveillance-capitalist offerings. But at the same time it has been driving me crazy how many things are being shifted toward this server-based architecture. For one example, I want an open-source app that will allow me to import recipes from any text or website automatically. But I want those recipes to save in files, be offline, and I do not want to maintain a whole damn server just to manage my fucking recipes.
Not everything needs to be web connected by default, and most people have no interest in running any kind of server.
If your recipes are formatted like markdown, then there are offline notes apps like Obsidian. The new issue becomes keeping your files backed up in case of whatever, and that’s when the self hosted server comes into play. This is a really good usecase for synching which can keep your small recipes files duplicated on your phone and your computer without ever leaving your network.
Synthing does not use a server based architecture.
If you have a Wi-Fi router in your home you are technically already running a server. With OpenWRT even quite practically, although sadly most routers are slighly too underpowered to do much with them.
Those same routers that still have problems with security updates, and are frequently the targets of cyber attacks? So how is it in any way a good idea to run entire server stacks, and databases (which throw a wrench in data portability compared to standard file formats), creating so much bloat and unnecessary attack surface, and then making all of these apps network-facing - opening them up to attacks?
How about instead I just use a standard text editor to save my recipe as a markdown file, and if I need to move it I can either get a usb cord or use Syncthing? Sorry but this whole self host movement is pretty insane.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, I disagree with the last part of what you’re saying.
The self-host movement is about taking control away from companies, and running web services locally instead of having to rely on companies for them and pay for them. Most things you can run locally without needing a server, but there are absolutely good use cases for server-based services. Some great examples of this are cloud storage, code repositories, and chat servers. You could run each of those things locally, but they are each improved by running them on a dedicated server designed for 24/7 uptime and centralized access.
My problem isn’t with open-source online services existing. Of course some things are inherently net-based. My problem is with the way everything is being done as a server even when it’s completely unnecessary. Syncthing alone - which is not server-based btw - is more than enough to take care of cloud needs for everything from calendars, to photos, recipes, text files, password databases, and more.
Hell, it’d actually be pretty interesting if someone did come up with a way to make a e2e chat client that works through Syncthing.
My point is I just want to download an app, have that app convert a recipe webpage into its own standard format, and then save that file on my own device. I do not want to deal with the hassle of getting Docker installed and working, nor to have it gobble up tons of computer resources just to do that one simple thing.
I agree with your post 100% I think. Removing oneself from big tech/data services like Google and Microsoft is resisting the regime. It’s especially useful for folks that may not be able to get out and protest, meet with their representatives, etc.
As for me, I’m running my *arr/media stack for myself and my close friends and family. Fuck Disney, Netflix, and Paramount. For our household, HomeAssistant keeps the lights on and SyncThing backs up our files to the NAS.
Spot on. Self-hosting is the most effective form of quiet, material protest we have. Every time your family uses Syncthing instead of OneDrive, you’re starving the machine of the telemetry it needs to function.
Running that stack for your inner circle is essentially building a “digital mutual aid” node. You’re taking the burden of surveillance off their backs and putting it on your own hardware where you can actually defend it. That’s the work.
Can your neighborhood communicate when the Internet goes down like Iran?
By… Stepping outside and talking to people? I think all neighborhoods have that ability, even if we don’t really use it much.
Probably not unless everyone has some radio device that can send as well as receive.
Like a wireless router?
HAM works too for some things.
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Quick question. Home assistant.
We are hooked on “Hey Google turn off the lights”
Is there a way to remove the Google from that but still use the voice aspect?
Edit: great!!! Thanks for the direction folks!!!
Yes, Home Assistant has this.
https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Works great. My biggest challenge was finding a decent microphone setup and ended up like many do with old Playstation 3 webcams. That was a while back and I would guess it’s easier to find something more appropriate today.
Great! Thanks a ton! I appreciate the link and the info!
Home Assistant has its own locally running voice assistant. There’s even hardware for it (think self hosted Alexa) that you can buy or build yourself
Oh great! I’ll check it out!
I know others have answered, but I wanted to give you a link. I have their device and it works great for turning things off and on out of the box. You can run it locally—if you have the hardware—or use their reasonably priced cloud subscription. I do the latter wanting to support them monetarily.
Thanks a bunch! I appreciate the link!
Home assistant has their own system I believe? If you sign up too their subscription? Or you can locally host whisper and piper yourself and go completely local.
Just FYI unless you self-host headscale, tailscale is centralised and not private. They claim it is end to end encrypted but their proprietary centralised control server distributes the keys, so they could very easily MITM you.
Tailscale is good tech and good crypto, but Applied cryptography cannot solve a security problem. It can only convert a security problem into a key-management problem, and tailscale does not do decentralised key management.
Glad to see this comment on the chain. I haven’t tried it myself (yet) but I’ve got a friend that does and says it works great.
It’s on my list. Unfortunately, it’s a really long list.
Are you serious? I had no idea Tailscale was a “trust me bro” kind of operation. I’ve always heard “serious” people boosting it.
Well they are a serious company with serious engineering capabilities. Just know that whoever runs the control server can control your network, and almost everyone uses Tailscale’s centralised control server, so they control the networks of almost all of their customers. Most of their customers are for internal use by companies which don’t care about relying on SaaS products. But if you self-host for resilience, using Tailscale doesn’t make much sense without also self-hosting the control server through the unofficial headscale implementation.
Can you help me understand what head/tail scale do? I’m at the “get friends and family on” stage so I’ve been struggling figuring out how to get friendly domain names working through Wireguard.
Note: I have only done this with Tailscale. I have not looked into this with headscale.
You can invite them to your network, or share a machine to their network. The second option is probably more likely what you will do with Tailscale since it is unlimited and the first option has a limited number of users for the free tier. The biggest hurdle will be them getting devices added to their tailnet so those devices can access your machine.
I imagine it’s maybe a little easier with headscale. I haven’t gone down that route yet. I would probably want to have my DDNS point to a VPS and have that be the entry point to my network. I could point it to my ISP IP, but one more layer that isn’t very expensive is probably smarter security wise.
Thanks!
Like all the “selfhosters” and their Cloudflare proxies lmao.
just use wireguard. :/
Along with headscale, I have also hosted Pangolin instance. Multi network setup with docker
Thank you for kicking this hornet’s nest. There is a lot of great info and enthusiasm here, all of which is sorely needed.
We have massive and widespread attention paid to every cause under the sun by social and traditional media, with movements and protests (deservedly) filling the streets. Yet this issue which is as central and crucial to our freedoms as any rights currently being fought for (it intersects with each of them directly), continues to be sidelined and given the foil hat treatment.
We can’t even adequately talk about things like disinformation, political extremism, and even mental health without addressing the role our technologies play, which has been hijacked by these bad actors, robber barons selling us ease and convenience and promises of bright, shiny, and Utopian futures while conning us out of our liberty.
With the widespread, rapidly declining state of society, and the dramatic rise and spread of technologies like AI, there has never been a more urgent need to act collectively against these invasive practices claiming every corner of our lives.
We need those of you recognize this crisis for what it is, we need your voices in the discussions surrounding the many problems and challenges we face at this critical moment. We need public awareness to have hope of changing this situation for the better.
As many of you have pointed out, the most immediate step we need to take is disengagement with the products and services that are surveiling, exploiting, and manipulating us. Look to alternatives, ask around, don’t be afraid to try something new. Deprive them of both your engagement and your data.
Keep going, keep resisting, do the small things you can do. As the saying goes, small things add up over time. Keep going.
[Edited slightly for clarity]
To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check
This is the world we live in. If you can actually string words together into grammatically correct sentences, then you are AI. It matters not whether you are or you aren’t. Like the witch hunts of Salem, all that is necessary is the accusation. I personally don’t care if you used AI, the message resonates. Don’t let 'em give you shit about your pony tail.
It is freeing really. I used to proof read my comments, then paste in google search to check for easy to catch typos. When AI arrived, I was even putting my text through them so they are more “common tongue” and not my personal shorthands.
Now I just post it.
It’s a tool. A tool that needs some heavy regulation, but a tool nonetheless
Come to i2p, fam.
TLDR: Protesting or resisting privately inside your house does not lead to social change and is not the most rational way of protecting yourself if you feel threatened by your government.
Self-hosting is not “resistance”: at most, it’s prepping for nerds, with computers instead of guns.
Self-hosting is not even a rational/efficient way of making a statement. If that’s what you want, it’s far more efficient to follow the established tradition of declaring you are moving to Canada and not following up with actual actions.
Don’t get me wrong: I can relate to the nerdy way of coping with the ugliness around us (I say “us”, but thankfully I don’t live in the US), but - the way I see it - it’s that your society that needs change, and self hosting won’t help with that.
Frankly, the shit you US people are putting up with is unreal.
It has always been (
US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe - read that again and pause a second to think about itthis isn’t true - see comments below), and it’s just getting worse.If you feel threatened you can essentially respond by fighting, fleeing, or cowering.
If you wanna FIGHT (this is what “resistance” is about), try to use whatever power you have and apply your energies to bring actual change. If you don’t feel comfortable acting outdoors, this could include lending your nerd skills to protesters or (nonviolent) resistance groups. Heck, even being a keyboard warrior is more useful to changing society than being a hobbyist sysadmin.
If you wanna FLEE, just leave the country. Honestly, there are better places to live than the US, and (if you have or plan to have any) better places to raise your children.
If you wanna COWER, then be a prepper or a self-hoster or whatever, but be aware that, while misrepresenting your reaction as “resistance” may make you feel more heroic than you are, spreading the misrepresentation can also lead others to cower instead of fighting. Is that what you want?
Preparation is part of fighting.
Pretty sure the Iranian protesters would benefit from private infra now that the internet is shut down.
Getting graphite OS phones can let you do all sorts of neat things like duress pins etc.
The average person is forming their activist plans on WhatsApp and Discord, and that’s going to be a problem. I remember all those kids in Hong Kong getting scooped up because the government was reading their texts and hacking their phones.
Don’t downplay what you can contribute.
This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’
You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.
Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.
If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.
The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.
People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.
Please don’t recommend android distributions with a shady funding model and that force users to buy expensive compromised Google hardware.
There are good options like LineageOS and e/OS/ that run on a huge variety of android devices without suspicious limitations.
Gonna be awful hard to organize resistance when the administration decides to cut everyone off from all the centralized means of doing so. The time to set up decentralized mesh networks is now.
US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe
How are you calculating this? Doesn’t seem right.
2024 was the worst year with 1,365 police killings in the US. That’s around 4 people for every million. Per capita this is a rate 8x that of France which I believe has the most police killings in Europe.
General European homicide rates vary on countries from 5 (Swiss) to 42 (Latvian) per million. It’s higher than the rate of police killings in the US.
However, the general homicide rate in the US is like 6x the European rate.
I only briefly checked the numbers, I hope I didn’t get anything wrong.
IDK where I’ve read that… should have double checked before posting, my bad.
Quick fact checking:
US police kills some 1,281 people last year (wikipedia).
1,281/340,110,988*100,000gives around 0.38 police killings/100,000 people, which is below homicide rate in EU.I couldn’t (be bothered to) find out what the overall European homicide rate actually is (it also depends on what you count as “Europe”), but Germany is at around 0.8, France at 1.8, Italy at 0.57, Spain at 0.9 and Poland at 0.8 (these are the five most populous countries). So… let’s guesstimate it at around 1? (numbers are from this random source).
We can conclude that US policemen are roughly 38% as deadly as European criminals (if it wasn’t clear, this last statement is a joke)
Don’t stop at self-hosting. We need all forms of community building, from organizing like-minded people to gardening, off-grid energy, etc.
Exactly, I’m glad more people are seeing it this way.
The goal of capital is to gain power and leverage, they don’t really care about some numbers.
It’s the dream of all tech companies to become a monopoly, they even say it with a straight face. They want as much control as possible? Why? So they can use the leverage for even more.
The beautiful/horrifying part is, the system weeds out any company that does not do this. The only way is for the end users to push back.
