Can definitely become a trend given so many devs out there and so much that AI can produce at home which can be of arbitrary code quality…

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it.

Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.

I spend quite some years with linux systems, but i am using llms for configurating systems a lot these days. Last week i setup a server for a group of interns. They needed a docker kubernetes setup with some other tooling. I would have spend at least a day or two to set it up normally. Now it took maybe an hour. All the configurations, commands and some issues were solved with help of chatgpt. You still need to know your stuff, but its like having a super tool at hand. Nice.

Nice article!

It's heartening in the new millennium to see some younger people show awareness of the crippling dependency on big tech.

Way back in the stone ages, before instagram and tic toc, when the internet was new, anyone having a presence on the net was rolling their own.

It's actually only gotten easier, but the corporate candy has gotten exponentially more candyfied, and most people think it's the most straightforward solution to getting a little corner on the net.

Like the fluffy fluffy "cloud", it's just another shrink-wrap of vendor lockin. Hook 'em and gouge 'em, as we used to say.

There are many ways to stake your own little piece of virtual ground. Email is another whole category. It's linked to in the article, but still uses an external service to access port 25. I've found it not too expensive to have a "business" ISP account, that allows connections on port 25 (and others).

Email is much more critical than having a place to blag on, and port 25 access is only the beginning of the "journey". The modern email "reputation" system is a big tech blockade between people and the net, but it can, and should, be overcome by all individuals with the interest in doing so.

I self-host most of what I need but I recently faced the ultimate test when my Internet went down intermittently.

It raised some interesting questions:

- How long can I be productive without the Internet?

- What am I missing?

The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad).

Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what I need and being offline really improve my productivity.