Recent thoughts

This post is going to be all over the place, but I just want to pour out the thoughts I have had on my mind recently.

Self-hosting

I have been moving away from cloud services and replaced most of them with local or self-hosted tools. I'm in the process of updating my personal computer and I could dedicate my current desktop as a personal server for media files. It's not a powerful computer, but it has 1.5TB of SSD and 1TB of traditional hard drive space. That is more than enough for my current needs.

I have been working on backing up my photos and videos from old Android phones and iCloud and it made me think about self-hosting all of it. It's actually a fair bit of work to download all of your iCloud photos and videos in full quality. It would be much easier if my photos and videos were on a platform that I control myself to begin with.

For now I just download backups weekly from iCloud to my local computer with icloud-photos-downloader. It's not a perfect solution, but good enough for now. I haven't found an iCloud replacement yet and I don't even know how easy it is to bypass iCloud on an iPhone. My next phone will probably be an Android so I just need something temporary to not upload any more of my personal photos and videos to the cloud.

Owning my data

Relating partly to the previous point. I deleted Google from my life in April this year. I had already stopped using most Google products, but I had the account for Youtube. I got more and more tired of getting unrelated suggestions from Youtube so I moved all my subscriptions to RSS and deleted my account. Now I just watch the videos from the creators that I follow and ignore all the suggestions. I had a good setup with yt-dlp and mpv, but lately Google has been blocking yt-dlp for users that are not logged in (at least for those using a VPN). I'm still trying to find a workaround for that, but haven't found one. Quite often the developers of yt-dlp will find a workaround for these things quite quick though.

I have also built the habit of thinking about what data I give out when browsing the internet. I don't feel that my threat model requires me to not leak metadata, nor does it prevent me from using iCloud for my photos, but I feel that it's always safer to own your data and be aware of who knows things about you. You never know when some company gets hacked or they decide to start training AI models with your data or photos.

A few years ago I stopped using any social media and deleted almost everything about me from the internet. I have since loosened my rules a bit (I have Instagram for example), but I just make sure that I'm not giving these services any data that I count as private or personal.

Reducing my dependency on big tech

Related to everything above, I guess that the point of this post boils down to me wanting to reduce my dependency on big tech and cloud providers in general. I want to be able to self-host most things and only rely on companies for things that are not worth doing myself. I'm not interested on hosting my own email server for example (at least not yet). I also find it worth it to pay for a company for servers to host my websites and services instead of needing to think about keeping a reasonable uptime with a computer in my office. I can always migrate my website to a different provider, and as long as I have my domain I can migrate my email to a different provider too. As an example, I just migrated my email from Proton to Mailbox and it took just a few hours in total.

As I get older I find myself thinking about self-sufficiency more. I find it safer to live off-grid than in the city in the long term because you're not reliant on someone to provide water and electricity for you. I'm still living in the city, but I'm hoping that someday I live at least partly off-grid. In the same way I'm still relying on companies to provide me digital services, but I feel that in the long term it's safer to to be as digitally self-sufficient as possible. And even if one never moves to live off-grid or self-host everything, it does not hurt to know how to do it.

Taking back my focus

“All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit alone in a room for any length of time.” - Blaise Pascal

I feel that a lot of today's societal problems stem from peoples inability to be alone and get bored. I feel like people feel the need to be hyper-connected all the time and get non-stop stimulus or they start getting anxious and even depressed.

It's really hard to have meaningful conversations with people anymore as most people are on their phone while talking to people face-to-face. I don't know if I'm getting old or what, but I get offended when talking with someone and they pull out their phone. People want IRL conversations to be as shallow and short as conversations in social media. I find it sad. Luckily I still have close friends and family that I can have deep and meaningful conversations with without anyone taking out their phones.

And I don't know if things are actually as bad as I feel they are. Maybe I'm just a gray beard (I'm in my thirties, but I already have gray in my beard) missing the old days. I just feel sad for people that don't have enough attention span to listen to a 1 hour podcast or read a book or even a longer article. Even the news sites are now giving you an AI summary of the news articles because people are too lazy to spend 5 minutes to read the whole thing.

And maybe it's just that I'm stuck in old ways and should open my eyes to the modern ways of communicating and consuming. It's just that I have seen a clear improvement in my mental health and overall life quality when I have opted for slower living and more meaningful and calmer interactions:

• Instead of social media, YouTube and news sites I have a dedicated RSS feed with personal blogs and Youtube channels and selected companies.
• Training without headphones, being present in the workout.
• Walking in the nature and stopping to listen to the sounds of it.
• Removing all notifications from my phone, just leaving notifications for incoming calls and messages from family and close friends.
• Listening on podcast and reading books instead of watching series and movies.

Sometimes I lapse too and scroll Instagram or get into a rabbit hole on Youtube, but this happens less than once a week and never when I'm with someone. And I don't like the feeling of being bored at all, I hate getting bored. But it's after getting bored that I get my best ideas and the greatest creativity.

And in a way my whole point here is contradictory, because I recently got back to IRC and I have seen/had some of the best conversations right there. So maybe I'm just a hypocrite here and just like the old ways better than the new ones, I don't know. I'm just ranting here...

I had a great conversation with a close friend recently. We were talking about simple/slow living and philosophy and what else. We are always either laughing at stupid jokes for hours or having deep conversations with him, there is no middle point ever. Just before we parted, he asked me a question that he had been struggling lately:

"Why are we (as humanity) building things? What are we trying to achieve? What is the end goal?"

Neither of us were really able to come up with an answer to this. What are we trying to achieve by improving productivity? What is gained from increased automation? What is gained from urbanization? Are we humans really better of with easier living or was life maybe more meaningful when you still had to carry water inside from a well and heat up your house with a fireplace? Is our life quality better now that we can read the news and talk with people the moment we wake up by just grabbing a mobile phone from the nightstand? Or was it better when you had to visit your friend and ask them to hang out with you? Or when you had to crab the newspaper from a newsstand or a coffee shop? Is easy and convenient really better?

I personally felt more connected with people before social media and the great digitalisation. Maybe I'm just in some middle life crisis here, I don't know. I just know that deliberately slowing and simplifying my life has made it a heck of a lot meaningful and a lot less stressful. Things that take more effort feel more meaningful.

Am I just getting old and missing the good old days? Or do others feels this way too?