I have always been too much of a control freak when it comes to privacy. I hate the current tech standard Google, Facebook or other big tech companies have pushed upon us, where you are under constant monitoring by these big giants and you cannot do anything about it if you just want to stay connected to the internet. By this time, it seems as if they have created a personalized virtual agent for every one of us that knows everything we do, everything that can draw our attention. It has always been so suffocating for me like, for example, when my wife calls me over messenger that we need a new bed sheet and bamn! your Facebook is flooded with bed sheet advertisement.

This is so not the way I want to exist in the online world. The technology from 20 years before can make a peer-to-peer call without a centralized server, but the best tech companies of the current world cannot! Well, it seems like, they can, but do not want to. They do not have any benefit in a peer-to-peer communication system. It all goes to the old saying:

If you are not paying for a product, then YOU are the product!

But, what if I do not want to be the product! What if, I do not want facebook to know that I need new bed sheet? The one solution is, of course, to not use their product in the first place.

But, there is another way, the beautiful, yet harder way. To minimize your digital footprints. Use Facebook, but do not use messenger for communication, host your own matrix server instead. Use AdBlocker if you do not want Google analytics to track all your clicks and redirects. Use Jellyfin for media server, if you do not want Netflix to control what you should watch and what you should not watch. Host your own torrent server and share files among your peers.

These are the thoughts that brought me closer to self hosting, where I can say, I control what I want to leak to the internet! I do not share much photos or memories in my social platform anymore, I use PhotoPrism and NextCloud for photo management. I do not use Messenger for communicating within my family anymore. I have hosted a matrix server for that. I have adblocker in my entire network so that I am not being tracked on every click. I choose which news to follow with RSS reader like FreshRSS. When I say these things have brought a lot of sanity to my daily life, I am not lying at all about this.

Selfhosting is like an addiction. When you pass the beginner phase and you know what you are doing, it becomes so much fun and addictive that you just dig into it whenever you get time. Keeping all the hatred aside for the big tech, they have indeed given us some blessings in disguise, like docker. This technology is so awesome that it cannot be explained in words. Google deserves the hatred that face for this advertisement-based business standard they have developed over the years and making privacy a joke for common people, they could have been so much more! But the technologies they have invented are worthy of the praise.