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?

  • balthisar@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    For me it’s simply being GenX. We used to have to roll our own, and when companies wanted to finally cloud-this or -that, it was natural simply to resist.

    I’m not a Luddite; I’ll use the cloud when it’s convenient, but I always have backup options and other ways of doing things.

    I am frugal, though, and I won’t pay for shit just because it’s convenient. I pay for Netflix, but view its content alternatively. Same for Disney. But I won’t pay for Apple Music or whatever Amazon keeps asking me to upgrade to. I won’t pay for some stupid telephone app to sync my data. I will pay for USENET access, though.