After getting my NAS up and running, I started to think, what can I actually use this device for? Other than just being a glorified local dropbox bucket, which, doesn’t sound that fun. I have a laptop with 1TB of disk space, so I could just hold all my dropbox images in my local SSD and that’s it.
Prelude
So I started to think, and I found Immich, and then I found the reason for all these things that have been building, VPS where I can host my own apps, machine where I can host all my smart home apps, and then the NAS, final piece of the puzzle, for now at least, where I can host all my other apps.
Web3 that wasn’t meant to be
You see, if you go back 10 or so years, social media platforms have come up, we have many of them, people have multiple accounts in different apps all around the internet. And this idea that if you use the app, and you get it for free, you are then the product, your data, your information.
But there was also a murmur of thoughts, that Web3 could be a decentralized place for all kinds of apps, but the information, your information, would be at the hands of you. And you would choose what data, and who to give that data.
But this was of course, too much, no platform that relies on data (google, fb, etc) want’s to give you control on what to do with your data, they always want more, and they’ve become reallyreally good at what they do.
My data, my choice
You see, I want to own my own data. I want to choose what to do with it, and it just happened, that my Google storage was 86% used, and I had to either, pay google, or more all my images away. Yes, they do live in Dropbox currently, but have you seen the abysmal interface Dropbox has for viewing images, no thanks.
So Immich to the rescue, but that just led me to the rabbit hole and to the deeper meaning of what I want to accomplish.
Build my own future
So since the future I so wanted, didn’t come from the corporate behemoths, I decided, since I have the knowledge, why not build it myself. Immich, as being the catalyst for moving all my photos to there, followed by some other apps (memos for google keep etc).
Yes, it’s going to be tedious, it’s going to take time and effort, but there is a ton of good apps, that I am willing to pay. For example, you can donate ~25$ for immich for a lifetime of usage. Most of the stuff will still be free, but you can do so with your own volition. There’s a ton of OSS software where people now have patreon or some other means of receiving donations so they can continue.
And if some software gets abandoned, it’s my data, it’s in a format I understand and can migrate to some other service, if need be. Or continue using the service for as long as I wish since I host it on my own machine.
Cost of things
Yes, I do knowledge I will pay a hefty fine, with time and resource used to build this future ecosystem. But it is a hobby, it is fun, and if I choose to use products that work really well, and not just something bleeding edge (even though Immich says it is, just that), I’m not too worried.
But once everything works, once everything runs, and I don’t have to touch anything, I can just let it sit there, and forget it exists. Keep using it and only fix stuff if they break.
Because in the end, I have adopted this philosophy now quite hard: My data is mine, and mine alone, and I choose how to use it.
Is there end in sight?
So where does all this end? Who knows, for now, I’m really committed to expanding my service list, installing everything on my own machines, and migrating all the data I can away from services that are not in my control.
I’ve stopped using Google Chrome, I started using Duckduckgo as my search engine, I will, all in good time, migrate my emails away from Google to maybe, protonmail, due to the privacy aspect of it. Move away from Dropbox due to hearing not so good things about them as a company.
But like my smart home, I do want to prioritize that everything needs to work flawlessly. I do want to keep going down the rabbit hole, but how deep is it for me is anybody’s guess. Maybe I’ll get tired of all this and have to do some migrating.
But even then, I can rent some VPS machines, move all my current app-stacks there, install some VPN software, and access them via that. So it’s not like I’m building myself to the corner where if I cant host these apps in my own home, everything is doomed. I just have to adapt and move on.
So here’s to fun in the future. Where I don’t have to adhere to big corporations ugly data hoarding, but can instead live a slightly more free life, knowing, my data stays with me, and not with some obscure data mining company that will utilize it however they see fit.