Selfhosted

I didn't want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc... And that's also how I ended up with a career in IT.

Liking computers in general and switching to Linux at 15 out of desperation.

After that all it took was getting an shitbox pc as a hand me down to make me go "Linux is also used on servers right? Shouldn't be too difficult to setup something." And that's how I got the bug.

I'm a marketer by profession, but I just moved to a new country to be with my husband and am still job hunting.

Growing up, my dad was a programmer. I was a kid in the 2000s, and I wasn't allowed to spend money online because everywhere just looked sketchy as heck then (and we also didn't have the disposable income). Over the years I've watched my dad build up his own movie downloading and streaming solution, home automation, etc, but never had the opportunity to really try my hand at this stuff till I moved out and suddenly had free unemployment time and a very supportive husband.

I'm still new to it all, but I've managed to get docker working, Komodo to manage containers, firefly III for finances, Pelican to run game servers (that none of my friends have really played with me on 😅) and created a basic homepage to link to everything.

I'm considering doing Jellyfin, but I'm not a huge movie/shows consumer, so haven't really started on that. It was nice being able to ask my dad for help when I was figuring all the basics out though. We never had that much in common to talk about, and this made me feel a bit closer to him, even if I live across the globe now.

I've always had a thing for tech. I used to make my own custom MySpace profiles, and pet pages on NeoPets, apply custom cursors to my PC, handled stuff when thr computer got viruses; all the stuff you'd expect of a 10 year old with an unrestricted internet access, and a love for technology. I did go to college for networking, but didn't finish, and ended up in an unrelated field (won't name here to avoid doxing myself, but I'm not even allowed to troubleshoot any tech to emphasize how unrelated this is).

I did kinda... Completely drop off for a while, but the thing that got me back was my most recent anti-Microsoft kick. Completely dropped Win10 (I'd usually had a windows and Linux machine at all times), dropped Google as my email, started using omg.lol for a lot of things, etc. Then I went half-in on a computer to use as a DNS-wide adblocker, and noticed that I could do... A lot more with it, and I like to tinker, so why not do a lot more with it? 2 years later, and it's still the best $100 I've ever spent tbh.

Besides privacy also moral reasons, using megacorps services means giving them money/power/data which in turn helps them do all the direct & indirect evils they do & influence (from exploiting monopolies & influencing demand side, to lobbying for lower taxes & legislature to keep/increase their monopoly, even just blankly supporting fascists political options bcs that has a great chance to enrich their shareholder value regardless of all the other effects, etc).

You know, try to leave a better place than you got it & whatnot.

Mostly gaming. I self-host three different game servers (Palworld, Minecraft and Terraria on occasion) and will be adding a TeamSpeak server soon to replace discord. Is it the best? Prolly not, but audio chat is all we really use Discord for anyway so we don't need the full feature stack.

I got laid off and needed something to do.

I'm not in a tech field now, but I used to be. I jumped ship when everything started moving to 'cloud based' because I don't trust anything I can't kick when it breaks.

Getting sick of google having a degree of control over my data and the increasing AI being jammed down everyones throats. Combined with the keylogging keyboards and OS's which are becoming more and more invasive by the month. Time for some liberation. I also enjoy learning coding, docker, networking etc. Cost is another factor. Although I could lie and say a 1 time fee for a server will be cheaper than Google One. Yeh it was at the start on paper but realistically after you upgrade drives and ram and buy backup drive etc it does start to add up.

Linux initially, giving way for me to see that the best alternatives to me are generally the ones I control.

And considering geopolitics, where I can see how dangerous a well-positioned spy/saboteur/paid actor can be, my next self host project is some ActivityPub social media, at least as an one-user instance since I don't want to act as a company yet, so I have control of where I'm posting from too.

Lack of trust, for the most part. I've been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it's Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or "friends" and family making life difficult, I've learned the hard way over the years I can't rely fully on anything not under my control.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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