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My way of rebelling against techbros and autocrats:
December 2024: quit all Big Tech platforms and start #selfhosting essential services
December 2025: write guides for newbies about how to self-host
I'm also in discussion with a blogger I admire to start a podcast about tech... where we'll focus on solutions (instead of problems)... aiming to inspire others to join in...
It's been a really heavy year but these little acts of rebellion give me hope ✨
@_elena Sweet! Just took the leap into self hosting this month. Bought my hardware and about to start installing software. Ive got ideas planned but love seeing an overview for whats recommended. Thank you Elena! Ive been sharing your intro fediverse videos with friends & family, its so much easier & likely more effective than trying to explain it myself.
@_elena
Bonus points: Invite people who aren't technically savvy / motivated enough to selfhost, to use your services. You can be the agent of change for more people than just yourself! Maybe it can be your gift to them. Maybe they'd be happy to help you out with something they're good at.
@_elena still no simple FTP server that doesn't require 287302723 different config files with 0xDEADBEEF command line options.
Honestly if a ftp server is more complicated than `ftpserver $HOME --write --read` then it is a failed one.
I love it and that is why I added your RSS to #TidySearch 🥰
@_elena My way of rebelling: Teach compsci whilst painting a positive vision for computing, to show how narrow-minded these powerful fools are!
And yes, I would check out your podcast.
@_elena its so fun switching off these mega-corp platforms and apps. you realize you don't actually need most of them at all.
@_elena As a busy dad, i dont have the time to set things up any more, and self hosting is seldom plug and play... I set up Home Assistant on a raspi, but it took time. More plug and play self hosting pls! 🙂 And i dont want to have 100 raspberry pis running things neither, so some sort of virtualization would be nice also.
@_elena yep the cost and knowledge makes FOSS and self-hosting feel inaccessible to most. In the long run it definitely saves much more, but anything to make it feel like less of a hurdle to friends and family.
I say start with having them practice booting to USB and VMs, dip their toes in and build their confidence.
@_elena Thank you for the great job!
@_elena The one massively painful thing here is the RAM price surge.
@_elena Podcast is a great idea. Can't wait for it.
@_elena your departure from big tech and embrace of open source and foss mirrors my own personal journey also in timeline!
I’ve been planting the seeds to get my professional livelihood from ethical tech consulting so that’s my primary focus for the 1st quarter of the year. Then alongside I’ll continue with my mission of raising and helping regular people untangle themselves from big tech.
@_elena Hell yeah! I wanted brush up on my IT skills so I set up a homeserver with virtualization in Nov 2024 and being able to divorce from Big Tech as it fell in line with fascism in 2025 was so liberating.
@_elena one of my biggest struggles is finding time for patch management. Does Yuno host make patching Mastodon a simple "update" button?
I appreciate your work bringing attention to these projects keep it up 👍
@Spirit they regularly release updates that are super fast and easy to install... at the click of a button. Bonus: they automatically back up apps before running an update, so if anything goes wrong you can restore things.
Disclaimer: smooth updates for me so far this year, I never had to restore anything
@_elena rock on!!!!
Great idea 🙌🏻 !
I think a podcast could reach even more ppl, who rather listen to podcasts than reading longer blogs. Maybe even with guests sometimes 🤷🏻?
With your projects you’re not just giving yourself hope, but also others 😊 🚀
@EloPup thank you and yes! we're planning to have guests :)
@_elena You warrior! And yes, they give me hope too 🙂
@_elena looking forward to these podcasts about self hosting…
@_elena oh, count me in!
@_elena Would definetely listen to a podcast like that 🤩
@Iloo thanks! Most people on the Fediverse will already be familiar with privacy and FOSS tools we'll recommend. But we think the podcast could be great for Fedi people's spouses, parents, siblings, cousins and friends who think that adopting these tools is "too hard" or "too time consuming".
Oh and the cherry on top is that we plan to use @Castopod for it 🤗
@_elena @Iloo @Castopod
This is a target audience that certainly needs the help and guidance.
I’m doing that for my family, in-laws, parents, friends and neighbours.
Will certainly tune them to such a podcast if I will provide non techies the tool, tips, insights and most importantly the courage to take the first steps themselves or purchase managed services from ethical providers.
@_elena I would love to move from a lot of the big tech services that I use.
The likes of Adobe CC, Webflow and Intuit are destroying me with the price increases. But they are all essential for my work.
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