Self-Hosting Goals

Back when social media and cloud services first started coming online, I didn't worry much about privacy. The worst case scenario seemed to be that corporations would know things about my taste so they could send me ads. I remember getting a lot of ads for feminine products when I was heavily involved with blogging and blogging communities (I guess that stuff was considered female coded in the 00s and early 10s) and thinking the big brother technology couldn't be that powerful if they thought I was female.

Ah, the good old days. Little did I know that the corporations that I thought were more powerful than governments would still sell what they had to enable surveillance, authoritarianism and fascism. Nowadays digital sovereignty is mentioned a lot, at both the national and individual levels. I ended up picking up an eBook (Stead Fast Self-Hosting by Adam Monsen) on self-hosting with a view to taking back my data as much as possible. Spoiler alert: I haven't gotten past the first step which would be to actually buy some hardware.

Maybe if I write out what my goals for running my own personal cloud server are, I'll get off my butt and start the project.

1. Local Cloud. De-Google. My main gmail account is always at risk of being full, and while I find attachments and files that I can delete, it's a game of inches when the biggest hogs of storage are videos of my kids that I don't have safely stored elsewhere yet. I have writing drafts and spreadsheets and other files in Google Drive that are probably feeding AI as you read this. Or maybe they already have. My Obsidian vault, pc backups, and a family calendar could also be part of that cloud.
2. Wordpress Hosting. If I ran a Docker Container that ran Wordpress, I could self-host my main blog and stop paying Bluehost. I do worry about the traffic levels affecting my ISP (the site isn't really that popular but there's no accounting for bots) and security, but obviously some cyber-security and firewalling would go with the territory.
3. Media Server. Those photos and videos that I free up from Google clutches would be nice to watch on a big screen from time to time. There's the remnants of a CD collection on our bookshelves that could be ripped to a drive too.
4. Pi-Hole or other Ad-Block. I understand the roles ads play in the Internet economy (or at least, I used to), but it's gotten out of control on many sites and it interferes with usability.
5. Security Cameras. While I abhor Flock and Ring, my neighbours have sometimes inquired about if I have footage of a given night (usually for bear activity) and I do think it could be good to have some cameras - I just want to be in control of how that gets used.
6. Local LLM. I'm writing this on an old Dell laptop that work was going to throw away; I cleared it and installed Linux on it, but the keyboard is a little wonky and it frequently runs out of memory when I run multiple browsers or anything memory intensive. I installed LMStudio to play with Local Large Memory Models so that my experiments with it would stay private, but I think these would run better on a machine with more horsepower.