I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
I’m a marketer by profession, but I just moved to a new country to be with my husband and am still job hunting.
Growing up, my dad was a programmer. I was a kid in the 2000s, and I wasn’t allowed to spend money online because everywhere just looked sketchy as heck then (and we also didn’t have the disposable income). Over the years I’ve watched my dad build up his own movie downloading and streaming solution, home automation, etc, but never had the opportunity to really try my hand at this stuff till I moved out and suddenly had free unemployment time and a very supportive husband.
I’m still new to it all, but I’ve managed to get docker working, Komodo to manage containers, firefly III for finances, Pelican to run game servers (that none of my friends have really played with me on 😅) and created a basic homepage to link to everything.
I’m considering doing Jellyfin, but I’m not a huge movie/shows consumer, so haven’t really started on that. It was nice being able to ask my dad for help when I was figuring all the basics out though. We never had that much in common to talk about, and this made me feel a bit closer to him, even if I live across the globe now.
I’m considering doing Jellyfin, but I’m not a huge movie/shows consumer,
Well, if you’re paying for [Insert Streaming Service Here] than I’d say it’s worth it. Save yourself the extra 10, 15, 20 dollars a month and use it on a company (or open sourced project!) that actually cares about its consumers, this can be said for Music streaming and “cloud” storage as well.
Oh definitely. Had a friend say I saved him like 100 USD in streaming all 6 seasons or something of a well known show because each season had to be rented separately and weren’t currently on any services. Was nuts when I heard the total.
I’m holding on till I’ve got finances rolling again, but a NAS is definitely in my plans!
I wanted more Dropbox space. Self hosted Nextcloud when Docker became a thing.
Ended up getting a job in tech as I got better with containerization and better at programming from scripting and reading Data Structures books
I fucking hate tech companies
I lack formal education in the tech field, but I honestly wish I didn’t waste my 20’s on drugs (it was fun though, honestly) and an attempt at a rap career, instead of getting my hands dirty in the field, so to speak. I got into computers in the early 2000’s, discovered linux in 2006, and since then I’ve been that friend who’s into computers and stuff.
I kind of forget what exactly got me into self-hosting . . . but youtube probably had something to do with it, with many youtubers like Raid Owl, Level1Techs, and even LTT talking about things like Jellyfin and TrueNAS, it got me curious as to why I never got into it sooner.
My god man, post the raps! Is there a linux DAW you recommend? I haven’t found one
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YPZiIgjR5M0
alternatively I’ve got a totally legit copy of Ableton, let’s throw down on the self-hosting equivalent to cocaine distribution tutorials such as this one from Master P
Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it’s been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.
Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.
I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica’s black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that’s like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you’re downloading our music on Napster, then we don’t want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find “alternative methods” for every piece of digital media I could, if that’s how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.
I still download and share all of Metallica’s discography out of spite, but haven’t listened to them since.
I love your origin story so much
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Engineer here
What division? Curious. I’m a mech eng specializing in HVAC. I didn’t get to attain my own PE stamp…life happened.
I do civil engineering work, mostly related to soils etc. I have a computer for work but that’s about as far as it gets for me professionally.
Awesome!
My background is in graphic design/marketing and I’ve mostly worked in the non-profit sector. A few years ago I canceled my Spotify subscription after they hiked up the prices and decided I wanted a way to stream my own music collection from anywhere. I found Navidrone, began learning docker, fell down the Jellyfin/arr rabbit hole, and eventually stumbled upon Cosmos Server as a simpler way to expose my containers safely. It’s been a fun project and a welcoming community so far.
Cosmos
Bravo! I deployed it on a test server just to how it was. Nice UI, great features as I remember. Seemed like a solid product. It’s got a well stocked app store.
Bravo! CosmOS does look pretty nice. If I had better hardware, I might try something like that. Right now I’m using Fedora Server because of the SELinux, copilot, and podman support out of the box.
I’ve noticed that, too, about the community. I think part of the reason for the friendliness is a desire to see the community grow. Self-hosting feels very grassroots.
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
I work in advertising
“I work in advertising” is an amazing signoff for this post. It works on so many levels, and I remain genuinely unsure which you intended. The bitter sarcasm of a veteran who saw this coming by virtue of having caused it? The smooth flex of a consummate professional? A stunning lack of self-awareness combined with simple earnest participation in the thread? In any case, thank you for making me stop and think :)
Same here, got locked out of my main gmail/google account and there was no real person to help me recover 10+ years of my stuff. Never again.
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).
sad OSCAR noises
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there’s a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it’s text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it’s not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it’s only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
I’m a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I’ve always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.
And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz
I’m a mechanic.
This is both my reason and explanation lol.
I do my own work has been said to be taken a bit too literally in my case. I got ripped off by Geek Squad when I was 18 and said “wow, it’s just like getting ripped off at a shitty mechanic shop” and ever since then it’s been all hands-on.
career
I sat on that fence but being a mechanic gives me guaranteed work and I basically work-out every day. It’s hard, but not brutal and the pay is decent. Surrounded by maga tho.
I’m a web developer and whenever I see my (awesome) mechanic I always wonder what it’s like on the “other side.”My dad was a mechanic when I was a child and I always regret never picking up those skills.
A lot of times when they run me through their problem-solving I’m like “damn, that’s just like reproducing a bug to find its root cause.”
I quit IT work to be a mechanic. It’s exactly the same problem-solving process, but the problems are almost always way less arcane. I’m very happy with the switch.
If you wanted to make the switch yourself, the skill sets are very interchangeable. You’re just debugging an alternator instead of an Active Directory setup. If you have a willingness to learn you’ll be up to speed in under a year.
I always regret never picking up those skills.
Never too late
Yes, but also factor in information in the mechanic space has no FOSS comparison. Some companies put out their official service manuals after a period of time but most charge your company out the ass to let you view everything in some proprietary walled garden. Troubleshooting a mechanical fault can be very similar to troubleshooting code or software, and sometimes it literally is a vehicle’s software, and out comes a laptop.
“What field am I in, again?”
https://charm.li/ at least there’s a piracy comparison. Closest thing to FOSS are the (sometimes quite good) walkthroughs of different projects you find on owners forums. I don’t know shit about nothin, but built myself both a decent car and server from other people’s junk
I’m also a mechanic, I self host for basically the same reasons and I just don’t like the idea of big tech spying on me . Definitely a lot of MAGA, it’s fucking annoying hahaha.
I guess that allure of rugged individualism attracts a lot of MAGA types to trades and small businesses. It’s been the opposite in education on the teachers’ side, but definitely adversarial with MAGA on the students’ and parents’ side. I used to teach current events, but I haven’t been able to do that for the last 10 years. Kids would find their way into your personal accounts, too, so I switched to federated platforms instead.
I’ve always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It’s so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.
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Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
I’m a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
Linux - the gateway drug.
Its gotta be the sox.
I was going to think up something more elaborate, but this is enough.
I’m also a bit of an electronics
hoarderrecycler, which probably got me into Linux in the first place. And Linux proved me right: old hardware is still good. My first server was a 32 bit laptop.I also work in the social sector btw.
That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.
I still have a means of booting up Windows if there’s a need (usually for a firmware flash too that doesn’t have a Linux alternative).
I was dual booting with Windows ME (which worked well for my computer). Distro hopping until I bootstrapped Gentoo from stage one.
