Identity... It used to mean "who I am" or even "what I do." Now, the word has
taken on a bit of an ugly connotation. Your "Identity" is how you login to the
cloud, and the big-tech metaverse. Every time I try to access a www page, or
download a program, or buy something cool on etsy, I'm prompted with "Sign in
with Google" or "Sign in with Facebook."
My Identity doesn't belong to me anymore - it's a passkey... and a method of
tracking every interaction that I have online. Unless you're completely off
the Meta-iCloud-Microsoft-Google services, this affects all of us.
I'm not going to pontificate about the privacy implications, or how we're all
feeding the AI models... there are many who are much more competent at
discussing these things... Instead, I just want to talk about an alternative
path.
*** They're not like us ****
Let's be real for a second... if you're surfing Gopher, you're not the average
internet citizen. You most likely know your way around a command-line, and
probably have already have at least a little mini-lab at your place... and
maybe a Sparcstation or three :-D
Back in the 90's, my university ran their entire infrastructure off of an IBM
3270 mainframe, and about 25 Windows servers. The single core Pentium servers
had a staggering 128MB of RAM, and the Compaq Fibre Channel SAN connected a
terabyte of storage (in 12u!!!) with 1Gb connectivity.
Now, we can buy refurbished workstations with 512GB RAM and dozens of cores
for very short money. And with all the amazing FOSS out there, it's really
simple to build up a pretty robust self-hosted cloud infrastructure.
*** Step by Step ***
My first step towards "cloud cutting" (a term I didn't coin - shoutout to pa2)
was to see if I could reasonably replace my Google Photos on my Phone. I'm a
huge photo nerd, and have my __physical__ camera with me everywhere.
~~Immich
I discovered a project called Immich... although they ask you to pay for a
server license, this open-source project is absolutely fantastic. The phone
app acts almost identically to Google Photos or iCloud Photos (not a apple
guy, so i may have the product name wrong). My photos background sync, and
since I'm in control of the backend storage, I can even replace my Adobe
Lightroom cloud, and store my RAW files on there! The software can run in a
Docker container, and takes only a few minutes to deploy - HIGHLY recommended.
*** Taking Back Email ***
In the journey to regain my Identity, the ability to be - who I say I am -
online absolutley requires email. Hosting your own email is a bit more of a
challenge than Immich was - The Big tech providers all require _DMARC records
and you have to comply with their PTR records requirements. AND you have to
have valid TLS certs... My first attempt worked, but gmail rejected every
message... not ideal!
~~~Moo
Eventually I opted to purchase a VPS for a reasonable rate, and deployed
MailCow. It's an all-in-one email suite that deploys in minutes on Docker.
Their DNS guide is stellar, and if followed to the letter works flawlessly.
They even have LetsEncrypt integration, and you get your TLS certs signed at
install!
*** thaweazl:~$ New Mail ***
At the beginning of this Gopher journey I was really hoping to find a
community of like-minded folks wandering around port 70. This morning I
received an email on my new server from a gopher user, and It was as exciting
as logging into the old Sun system and seeing "New mail".
While the larger world loses their identity to Identity, don't take this
Gopher world and smol internet for granted. It's truly wonderful that these
spaces still exist!
