I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP and it was a fantastic experience / worth it but it cost some money and time which can be hard to find.
I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.
> Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.
This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work.
> I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP
I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?
I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home.
I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book.
I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.
My self-hosting infrastructure will probably outlive me.
I personally relate to the person you're replying to. I sleep better not worrying about HDD health or if my APs can reach their controller. Tried it - not for me.
Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.
I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.
Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.
That's your demand, not everyone's demand. And it seems are also indirectly assuming here that this is impossible without self-hosting, which also is not necessarily true.
The problem, is, we don't know. Self-hosting is like backups, it's working for a situation which might or might not happen; it's annoying, and it can save your ass, but most of the time you will never know if it ever will save your ass, until it actually happens. And until that point, it's just annoying. So we usually don't know if we really want to re-read a specific book and whether it has been become unavailable for us. We simply don't know that, until it happens.
> I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.
True, but that's why you should have backups. You don't need to manage a whole infrastructure for all your stuff, when you can also just make regularly backups. Of course, to be fair, most people don't even make backups, or know how to manage them well. But I would say those people can't (or should?) self-host their infrastructure anyway, they would probably blow their own data up in one way or another and lose them anyway.
> I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.
See, that's your stance, most people don't give an f** about this. They want things now, and don't care for some uncertain future.
> but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical.
Which most people are not. But it's not about the technical ability, self-hosting is mainly a problem of time, money and habit. Yes, many people can get it done if they invest into it, but they don't, many can't. And that won't ever change.
Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.
Or, because they do not know and do not care what is happening. Yes, they only care about comfort, who reads TOS anyway, right?! : /
But if the same was happening to their physical not digital properties then they might be furious.
However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.
"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".
I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features... Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is important, and for many things there is no option.
I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay someone I trust.
- You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it.
- You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app!
- Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a profitable target anyway.
- Update require to restart the container with the latest release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel have a community of open source devs doing the updates for you.
Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the future is bleak.
Everyone go checkout immich.
That’s not to say there aren’t issues of ownership and control to be concerned about, but they are providing real value to many users, especially those who aren’t technically minded.
To the point about people not knowing how much they've given up, I think another way to phrase this is that people don't know how much has been taken away from them. This is why we need better consumer protections for internet services.