4 minutes reading time
I deleted years of self-hosted infrastructure. I got tired. Lazy.
Used to be a point of pride. A digital sovereignty fetish. I’d sit around nursing a massive self-hosted ego, running my own NAS, instances of Nextcloud. Or ownCloud. Whatever the fuck the open-source martyrs are pushing these days. I had Pi-holes. DNS servers. File syncing that broke every other Tuesday. I treated my house like a goddamn SaaS company, convinced I was sticking it to late-stage capitalism by compiling my own misery in a terminal window.
I was wrong. I just gave myself a second unpaid job.
I got older. Stupider, arguably. The maintenance fatigue set in like a rot. Migrating disks. Broken upgrades. Let’s not even talk about reverse proxies or certificate management. Eventually the maintenance cost exceeded the psychological value of "owning my data." The truth is my data is mostly trash anyway. Much like those old diary posts I lost years ago because I was too lazy to back them up. Entropy wins. Always does.
So I nuked it all. Formatted the drives. Burned the philosophy to the ground.
I use Google Drive now. Google Docs. Google Photos. I handed my soul over to Sundar Pichai and you know what? It feels actually shitty. The corporate overlords can train their algorithms on my blurry vacation photos and grocery lists. If they think they can squeeze any value out of my miserable life, they're welcome to try. My friends probably think I'm an AI anyway, given the emotional range I display, so maybe the data loop is closing. People will probably judge me for selling out. Fuck it. Get rid of everything.
But not quite everything.
I kept what I thought materially improves my life. The pragmatism kicked in.
I kept the media server. One huge hard drive filled with movies I hoarded over the years. I run Jellyfin for that, mostly because media ownership is arguably the only ownership that still matters when streaming platforms keep deleting shows.
I added a headless qBittorrent setup. AdGuard Home runs network-wide because I despise ads more than I despise myself. Audiobookshelf is humming along—it handles both audiobooks and e-books far better than whatever Amazon is peddling.
Then there’s the hardware graveyard. I don't run a rack of enterprise servers humming like a jet engine. I run trash. Two ancient Dell laptops—wait, no, one is a first-gen i7 and the other is a fifth-gen i5—and a couple of Raspberry Pis (a 3B and a 4B). The 5th gen i5 handles Jellyfin transcoding perfectly. The DNS servers sit on the Pis. It's a setup built out of poverty and stubbornness, just like my entire existence since moving from the village to a tier-3 college.
I also dumped Debian and CentOS. I used to care about server orthodoxy. Not anymore. I put Fedora on everything. I use it on my workstation, so why switch contexts? I stopped optimizing for internet consensus and started optimizing for my own shrinking cognitive bandwidth. I run almost everything in Podman now. Rootless containers for the win. Well, mostly. AdGuard still needs root privileges to hook into the network. Compromises.
Tailscale changed everything. Before, networking was a nightmare of NAT traversal, VPN setups, and firewall rules that made me want to swallow glass. Tailscale removed the pain entirely. I created a subnet router so all my devices across different locations talk to each other without exposing ports to the open internet. For things that need web UI access, like the qBittorrent or AdGuard interface, I slapped on Cloudflare tunnels. It just works.
I track a few mundane things too. Traggo for personal tracking, and Donetick for household chores. Oh, and a Bitwarden-compatible password vault. Because I might be lazy, but I'm not using the same password for everything like an absolute moron.
Maybe maturity in self-hosting is just learning what not to self-host. I no longer want a homelab that proves something to random nerds on Reddit. I want one that quietly works while I rot in peace.
(This post is just copium. I don't know how long this will last before I go back to my old ways.)