I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground. That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car. Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we’re all running in our homelabs. Here’s what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting. Every service you don’t self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It’s baked into the infrastructure. Individual privacy is a losing game. You can’t opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here’s what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn’t feed their systems at all. When you run Nextcloud, you’re not just protecting your files from Google - you’re creating a node in a network they can’t access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren’t sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren’t being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE. I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That’s when I realized: we can’t rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own. This isn’t about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:
Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control
File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing
Passwords that aren’t in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass
Media that doesn’t feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea
Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger. Where to start if you’re new:
Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation. Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft. Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust. Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.
If you’re already self-hosting:
Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.
The goal isn’t purity. You’re probably still going to use some corporate services. That’s fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there’s a network that can’t be dismantled by a single executive order. I’m working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it’ll be profitable, but because I’ve realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure. We’re not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we’re building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that’s a node in a system they can’t control. They want us to be data points. Let’s refuse.
What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?
EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I’m just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think “rule of three” sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.
More importantly, a few people asked about a “0 to 100” guide - or even just “0 to 50” for those who don’t want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my “Where to start” list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:
The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It’s appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.
The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.
The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.
I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.
I agree with your post 100% I think. Removing oneself from big tech/data services like Google and Microsoft is resisting the regime. It’s especially useful for folks that may not be able to get out and protest, meet with their representatives, etc.
As for me, I’m running my *arr/media stack for myself and my close friends and family. Fuck Disney, Netflix, and Paramount. For our household, HomeAssistant keeps the lights on and SyncThing backs up our files to the NAS.
Spot on. Self-hosting is the most effective form of quiet, material protest we have. Every time your family uses Syncthing instead of OneDrive, you’re starving the machine of the telemetry it needs to function.
Running that stack for your inner circle is essentially building a “digital mutual aid” node. You’re taking the burden of surveillance off their backs and putting it on your own hardware where you can actually defend it. That’s the work.
Can your neighborhood communicate when the Internet goes down like Iran?
By… Stepping outside and talking to people? I think all neighborhoods have that ability, even if we don’t really use it much.
Probably not unless everyone has some radio device that can send as well as receive.
Like a wireless router?
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Quick question. Home assistant.
We are hooked on “Hey Google turn off the lights”
Is there a way to remove the Google from that but still use the voice aspect?
Edit: great!!! Thanks for the direction folks!!!
Home Assistant has its own locally running voice assistant. There’s even hardware for it (think self hosted Alexa) that you can buy or build yourself
Oh great! I’ll check it out!
I know others have answered, but I wanted to give you a link. I have their device and it works great for turning things off and on out of the box. You can run it locally—if you have the hardware—or use their reasonably priced cloud subscription. I do the latter wanting to support them monetarily.
Thanks a bunch! I appreciate the link!
Home assistant has their own system I believe? If you sign up too their subscription? Or you can locally host whisper and piper yourself and go completely local.
Just FYI unless you self-host headscale, tailscale is centralised and not private. They claim it is end to end encrypted but their proprietary centralised control server distributes the keys, so they could very easily MITM you.
Tailscale is good tech and good crypto, but Applied cryptography cannot solve a security problem. It can only convert a security problem into a key-management problem, and tailscale does not do decentralised key management.
Glad to see this comment on the chain. I haven’t tried it myself (yet) but I’ve got a friend that does and says it works great.
It’s on my list. Unfortunately, it’s a really long list.
Are you serious? I had no idea Tailscale was a “trust me bro” kind of operation. I’ve always heard “serious” people boosting it.
Well they are a serious company with serious engineering capabilities. Just know that whoever runs the control server can control your network, and almost everyone uses Tailscale’s centralised control server, so they control the networks of almost all of their customers. Most of their customers are for internal use by companies which don’t care about relying on SaaS products. But if you self-host for resilience, using Tailscale doesn’t make much sense without also self-hosting the control server through the unofficial headscale implementation.
Can you help me understand what head/tail scale do? I’m at the “get friends and family on” stage so I’ve been struggling figuring out how to get friendly domain names working through Wireguard.
Note: I have only done this with Tailscale. I have not looked into this with headscale.
You can invite them to your network, or share a machine to their network. The second option is probably more likely what you will do with Tailscale since it is unlimited and the first option has a limited number of users for the free tier. The biggest hurdle will be them getting devices added to their tailnet so those devices can access your machine.
I imagine it’s maybe a little easier with headscale. I haven’t gone down that route yet. I would probably want to have my DDNS point to a VPS and have that be the entry point to my network. I could point it to my ISP IP, but one more layer that isn’t very expensive is probably smarter security wise.
Thanks!
Like all the “selfhosters” and their Cloudflare proxies lmao.
just use wireguard. :/
Along with headscale, I have also hosted Pangolin instance. Multi network setup with docker
Don’t stop at self-hosting. We need all forms of community building, from organizing like-minded people to gardening, off-grid energy, etc.
I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.
Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.
You’re right. We’ve been traded convenience for our autonomy for way too long, and it’s created this massive power imbalance where a few tech bros basically own the digital roads we walk on. Voting with your wallet is a huge first step, but like you said, the real work starts when we actually take responsibility for our own data.
That’s exactly why I’m moving toward helping local businesses and groups build out their own nodes. It’s one thing to stop paying for a subscription, but it’s another thing entirely to stand up your own infrastructure that doesn’t report back to a corporate mother-ship. Every person who rejects the “default” and builds a private alternative is a small win for the rest of us, it’s about making the corporate extraction model fail by simply making it unnecessary.
In a fascistic enough world where this would matter, people who abstain from the system are automatically flagged to be shot too, just fyi. You gotta also fill the normie services with conformist content to not become a detected anomaly if you really want to do it properly.
This is the “Gray Man” strategy. If you have zero digital footprint in 2026, that absence of data becomes a data point itself. Anomalies get investigated.
I think we need to separate Camouflage from Logistics.
I’m not suggesting you delete your digital existence and live in a Faraday cage. By all means, keep the normie accounts. Post the cat photos on Instagram. Keep a Gmail address for the spam. Feed the algorithm just enough “conformist” content to look boring. That is your camouflage.
But Resistance Infrastructure isn’t about hiding, it’s about capability.
It’s about ensuring that when the “system” decides to de-platform your community group, or lock your bank account, or shut off the internet in your region during a protest, you still have a way to function.
To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check
This is the world we live in. If you can actually string words together into grammatically correct sentences, then you are AI. It matters not whether you are or you aren’t. Like the witch hunts of Salem, all that is necessary is the accusation. I personally don’t care if you used AI, the message resonates. Don’t let 'em give you shit about your pony tail.
It is freeing really. I used to proof read my comments, then paste in google search to check for easy to catch typos. When AI arrived, I was even putting my text through them so they are more “common tongue” and not my personal shorthands.
Now I just post it.
It’s a tool. A tool that needs some heavy regulation, but a tool nonetheless
100%
I do find it funny that I offer so many friends and family access to these services, and they generally just take the accounts and never use them.
This! I’d say that the best we can do is educate. Over the last 20 years people got taught to be lazy and go with the herd. They don’t want to change, all their stuff is already “in the cloud” and “I don’t have time to go tinker with that nerd stuff, I need something that works”.
“Why learn a new messaging app if everyone is using WhatsApp already”
– some of my friends and acquaintances 2025
Because you, and everyone, is in a huge bubble.
Normal people don’t give a shit where stuff is hosted, or if it’s hosted at all. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less what happens to their catpics if their phone gets crushed and they don’t want to use a separate messaging platform just to talk to you.
The things you think are important absolutely don’t matter to them. Most people don’t give a single second of thought to where their documents should live, and will just download it again on a second device instead of synchronizing anything.
It’s really nice that these things exist, but why would someone do anything with them if they literally don’t have a purpose for it?
My excuse was I don’t act for what I believe in because I don’t know how to. Your post showed me, I kinda do. I was doing it already, I should double down on it and most important help others on their journey. You’re a force multiplier today. Tomorrow some folks who read your post will be as well.
That means a lot, the force multiplier thing is exactly why I posted this. Building for yourself is a great start, but bringing others along with you is how we actually scale the resistance. We need more nodes in the network, so keep doubling down.
The Connection: Use Tailscale.
Be prepared that this can be shut down.
There is no way around talking with politicians and other citizens to make sure that human rights and democracy is not further abandoned.
Be prepared that this can be shut down.
Everything can be shut down. Just because you don’t see it happen much in the US, doesn’t mean it’s not on some official directive.
Been wondering for a while if it was worth sticking around on this plane of existence. Feeling like nothing was going to get any easier or better, wondering if my life would just be watching horror rafter horror until the tech I loved stop working and the world went dark as they came for me and mine.
Then I saw Benn Jordan’s Anarchist Gift Guide video and realized the same thing as you: I may not have a lot of skills to offer the world, but I’m neurodivergent, a sysadmin for higher ed, and (used to, at least) like to tinker. I realized my disdain for the humanitarian and moral failings of the system we currently reside in could be married to my hobbies and feel like I was doing something more than just protesting, donating, and waiting to die.
My goals are to fix up my home environment, get my 3D printers working, set up an exercise area, set up a Meshtastic relay and other support networks for my local area, update a media server for friends and family to enjoy, including a request system, and do anything else along the way the provide a system of communication and sanity that removes as much reliance on the government and corporations as I can.
It finally got me to fix some bugs in existing services I already manage and this weekend my wife and I are starting the work on the exercise room, for the benefit of our bodies. Not saying Benn’s video saved my life, but it gave me a purpose, again, in a world that feels increasingly aimed at reducing me to a sad data point on some graph. I hate what this world has become and avoid social media at all costs, but now I can do something locally that will feel like I’m doing something to help.
I have a particular set of skills that make me a nightmare for groups like ICE. I just need coffee, my ADHD meth, and some weed gummies to see it through. Thanks for posting this! I will save it and refer to it as I go.
Prescription meth does wonders for focus. Lol
I’m riding the same struggle bus and there are a lot of us. More like a struggle cruisliner, or struggle ark. Keep up the fight. I know it’s exhausting, but don’t let the bastards drag you down.
Hell yeah dude(ette)! We got this!!
I don’t have worries about password managers like bitwarden as the vault is zero knowledge and encrypted with a, to bitwarden, unknown key.
And I trust that bitwarden can secure their infrastructure better than me.
About your question what I host at home:
OPNsense
Veeam Backup and Replication (not (F)OSS but I like it and it’s reliable. We also use it at work so it helps my profession)
The *arr Suite
HortusFox (plant management)
Immich
Jellyfin
Syncthing
Resilio
Unifi Network Application (Also not FOSS)
Uptime Kuma
Wallos (subscription tracker. Pretty awesome overview!)
PiHoleCan’t remember when I started.
I believe it was around 2019 or 2020.
It started with a Raspberry because I wanted a NAS but was too cheap for a proper NAS appliance like a Synology NAS.
Fucked the install up a few times
Bricked the OS install during an upgrade (had 2 USB powered hard disks plugged in. But the PI had not enough to supply both and itself during writing to it so the network share sometimes failed)
Installed Plex
Found out Plex doesnt allow transcoding with the free version
Found out Jellyfin and installed it on the Pi.
Bad experience with Jellyfin and anime releases as they use ASS/SSA subtitles
Later upgraded to an i5-11th Gen NUC to get HWA transcoding on Jellyfin
Fucked up the Intel driver situation but HWA somehow worked
Inplace upgraded the NUC from Debian 10 to Debian 12 and restored my docker container from backup
(I assumed it would take like 4h or so to replace the SSD, install debian, install the core packages (like docker, etc.) and restore the files. In the end it took about 8h (after an 8h workday) and finished around 3am. But it worked. Very well on top.The hobby is expensive but rewarding.
My stack:
HPE 1930-24G PoE switch
Unifi AP mini
HP ProDesk SFF with an i5-7th gen (manually upgraded to something we were throwing out. Harvested the CPU. Crosschecked the BIOS support with the quickspecs by HP) (Proxmox with OPNsense virtualized)
Intel i5-11th NUC (Docker host)
Intel i3-13th NUC (primary Proxmox host. Holds the Veeam Backup server)
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB (docker host with the sole purpose of doing pihole DNS)
uGreen DXP4800+ with 4x15TB in RAIDZ2 (swapped the OS with a TrueNAS Scale SSD.)Newcomer:
GL-iNet Slate 7 as my travel router. Configured a Wireguard VPN on it with the OPNsense guide. Worked very well.
I have to commend the guide writer on it. But the steps were a bit confusing if you werent reading it carefully.Picture of my stack (literally) :)
Can we all pitch in and send @Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com a box of zip ties?
zip ties are single use though, better to get a pack of velcro cable ties
One step ahead.
Great points, and there’s some amazing discussions going on here!
One thing I’d like to add is EVERYONE needs to start setting up some meshtastic nodes. It’s really easy to setup (just hook up a USB cable from your computer to a esp32 board, visit a website to get the configuration, and that’s pretty much it), it’s cheap (as little as $30) and it is secure. Build 2 nodes (one to leave at home, and another for your backpack). This way you’ll be able to communicate should the Internet become unavailable or unsafe. You can also use this at a protest so that you still have a means of communication without needing to bring your phone that the Feds will be able to track.
I started with Meshtastic, then started getting into MeshCore since it seems like it scales much better.
It is disappointing that there’s already some fragmentation, considering that this is a small community to begin with. Hopefully both can flourish.
Can you elaborate a bit? I checked their website but I’m a noob. I’m in Europe, I don’t know if this network is in use here. Also I’m not sure I can see the use case for me now but I don’t mind paying 30€ if it can be useful to others, and maybe to me later. To add a bit of context : I think we are quickly following the american trend at least in my country
It works in Europe too. It uses LoRa (A Long Range radio protocol) to be able to send messages out to other nodes, which can bounce them out to further nodes. A node can be configured to relay through the Internet to reach people in other areas.
I ordered the radio shown below from a kit on Amazon (it’s a Heltec v4 and came with a battery that isn’t pictured) and it took about 5 minutes to setup. Attaching the antenna to the board was the hardest part.
For those of you who are interested in this but don’t know where to start I think https://www.freedombox.org/ may be a good starting point. It’s been around for a long time, provides easy enough installation and a nice web interface for management. Its based on Debian and you can give it a try on their demo.
Also the vision for the project aligns pretty much with what op is saying https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Vision
Here we go. The war has started, whether you like it or not. No more pussy talk, now it’s time for us to act in whatever antagonistic way we can to the current regimes.
It’s hard to call it anything else when you see the actual human cost on the street. But the most “antagonistic” thing we can do right now isn’t just venting, it’s making surveillance models obsolete.
It’s creating an entire ecosystem for ourselves, and locking the monsters out.
Exactly, I’m glad more people are seeing it this way.
The goal of capital is to gain power and leverage, they don’t really care about some numbers.
It’s the dream of all tech companies to become a monopoly, they even say it with a straight face. They want as much control as possible? Why? So they can use the leverage for even more.
The beautiful/horrifying part is, the system weeds out any company that does not do this. The only way is for the end users to push back.
