It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what I am trying to
do for myself is to "disconnect from the internet". That's not really
true. The internet is wonderful and I want to participate in a lot
of what it has to offer. I do want to remove myself from the
corporate internet; that is, the dystopia of web apps that track
you as you navigate the web. Like the tools that promise the
world but quickly attempt to monetize your activity and forsake
some or all of the things that made them worth using. Or media apps
that force feed you mediocre "content" created by people just to
serve the underlying algorithm.
Getting onto SDF and participating here is part of my journey away
from that sort of desolate web. Another part is building out a
home server that can take serve some of the needs that these
megacorps currently do. I don't really want to depend on netflix
or disney to entertain me via streaming. They should go make media,
I'll worry about purchasing/acquiring it and getting it onto a
screen. At the moment I've got Jellyfin setup on a Raspberry Pi
with some movies, books, and music. It's sitting inside of a
Tailscale mesh network so that I can use it outside of my home
network and I have really been enjoying it. Yes, there's work
involved in setting it up; getting the media, making sure the
metadata looks good, and then doing the file transfers. But it
kind of reminds me of getting into vinyl (which is so weird
considering the fact that getting into vinyl was my reaction to
the digitization of everything haha). I think that it scratches that
itch of being more connected to and invested in what I am consuming.
I also own this stuff and am not worried about the overlords
removing them from the platforms.
I'm starting to explore the idea of building out a more robust
homelab. Maybe an Intel NUC or even an old HP Prodesk or Lenovo
mini PC.
Stay tuned I guess (if you are reading and interested anyway).
