Some people get into self hosting just because they’re interested in the mechanics of it, but many people I think got inducted by the fact that for example, Facebook or snapchat make it so difficult to save your own pictures or migrate to another service, or the possibility that Google is reading all of your emails, etc. Others may have been radicalized by a specific event, such as a service provider closing up business and therefore you lose your data.
For me, it was Spore com. I loved Spore, from the time I got it for my 10th birthday to maybe the age of 16 or 17 I poured hundreds or probably thousands of hours into this game. As I got older I became less invested in the gameplay and more invested in the creative aspect of it. I designed some badass creatures and spaceships that I was really proud of. I had a whole line of Spaceships that all served different roles in my head cannon, with different races of aliens following different themes.
EA/Maxis/whoever runs Spore now purged all of them from spore.com, and now they’re gone. Years of my childhood essentially put into a locked box and the key thrown away. For me it was like losing a scrapbook in a fire. What right did they have?
So I ask, What radicalized you?
Apple’s near-adoption of NeuralHash.
For years I was comfortable with using big tech companies that had strong tech credentials and a level of trust in the community for implementing things well, securely, and in a way that preserves privacy and respect for the user. Closed systems provided by them were therefore trustworthy to me, having faith that the world-class security professionals and software developers and product owners were all implementing things well, even though I had only limited direct visibility of that. Apple in particular had a reputation for having the most respect for users and their privacy.
Then NeuralHash broke the spell for me. I had an epiphany, a sudden realisation that the untrustworthiness I knew existed in other companies existed in these ones too. I switched to a firm belief that if it’s possible for a company to do something naughty with your data, then on a long enough timeline it’s inevitable that they will.
I resolved then to avoid big tech wherever I can, and where I can’t I try to implement things in a way such that it isn’t ever possible for them to do nasty things with my stuff. I’ve de-Googled, de-Appled, and de-Amazoned, and returned to having a strong emphasis on managing my privacy and taking ownership of as much of what I use as I can.