On the face of things, self-hosting your own knowledge stack looks like a noble endeavor. You keep the digital sovereignty of your data, learn some new skills, and gain some measure of control over your digital life back from the companies that want to profit off it. And those are good, worthwhile reasons, because without pushback the too-big-to-fail tech companies are pushing their dystopian ideals onto the world. Our cloud storage quotas are only rented by the hour, and that means our archives, our data, our history are living on borrowed time.

So we spin up servers at home, power on NAS enclosures, and get to grips with the very real fact that everyone is a sysadmin in the future. Of course, this gives us a false sense of security, not just about our data, but about our place in the world. We feel like we're the counter-culture, the revolution writ large, but I have news for you — all it means is that we're the landlords now, holding our past lives hostage.

Control knowledge, control the population

Do we really own anything in the age of digital entitlements

The study of history is to discover our future. This phrase turns up in different cultures, geographical areas, and eras, transcending our differences. I believe it's one of the truisms that shape, and will continue to shape, our world. To study the past, we must preserve it; otherwise, it's all guesswork, and that's where self-hosting comes in today. It's a direct response to the transient nature of digital storage when data is treated as a commodity, with no more value than can be extracted commercially, and there lies the rub.

While knowledge has monetary value above its intrinsic value, self-hosting doesn't democratize access to knowledge or preserve human achievements and understanding so that those who follow us can build upon the foundations. All it does — and this is important — is make more landlords in our digital dystopia.

The rest of the world doesn't have access to what's on your NAS, does it? Didn't think so, and for good reasons. There's nothing on mine currently because of an unfortunate consequence of me being a sysadmin (yes, I wiped years of NAS storage accidentally), but even if there were, I wouldn't leave ports open to the Internet, because people suck, and there's no way that I can guarantee the safety of the private data my family wants to keep for posterity. I specifically use services like NetBird to access my home network without open ports, thanks to the magic of NAT traversal and STUN, and that's as close to sharing as I get.

Weaponized censorship

On some levels, that's a net positive. I can't argue against the need to have archival copies of data like eBooks, art in all its myriad forms, and encyclopedic knowledge preserved in many homes worldwide. Those disparate parts are also the problem, though, because how do you establish provenance, fact, and truth from fiction, when there is no central repository to compare against, and the powers that should be preserving their copies are actively rewriting, censoring, and straight-up deleting the knowledge — the truth to power — that has been built over generations of struggle.

I don't have an answer to this, and likely nobody does, not right yet. But knowing there is an answer to find is just as important as the eventual knowledge. That's how science works, how engineering works, how the tenacity and grit of the human spirit works when facing the unknown or unknowable.

When everything is digital, what does our future look like

It's never been more important to archive a permanent record

Self-hosting fixes one primary problem: spiraling subscription fees. Setting up the necessary hardware and software to wean yourself off the cloud takes a long time when you have work, family, and other needs. File storage, photo storage, video storage, and eBook storage gives you the basics, except for email, which is a whole different level of frustration to self-hosting, and I wholeheartedly caution against trying.

And once you've got all that set up for one user, you have to do at least part of it for every other family member or trusted friend that's going to be using your new apps, and hope your ISP doesn't detect odd traffic coming from your home and throttle your connection. Sharing individual files is fairly simple, but sharing anything more complex is substantially trickier, with overlapping permissions to deal with, and that's if you can teach your friends and family how to use the new web apps.

The self-silo'ed data on your new home server might be more secure and not cost you more than the electricity bill to use, but it's not convenient, and that reduces buy-in from the people you want to be using the server and making the infrastructure get anywhere near as seamless as cloud providers takes a giant amount of effort, if it's even possible.

We can't trust our perceptions or memory

It's never been easier to create, to make your mark on the fabric of reality. But at the same time, it's harder to know what we can trust, while disinformation, misinformation, and unwittingly passed erroneous "facts" are everywhere. At one time, only monks living in seclusion, untainted by society, were tasked with recording the entirety of human knowledge and painstakingly copying it between generations so it would not fade from view.

Now it's handled by other cloistered individuals who get into flame wars on forums, listservs, and GitHub commits, while engaging in edit wars and public pedantry on Wikipedia. The recording of knowledge has been outsourced to those who actually want the task, and not those who might be good at it, and we're all going to suffer for it at some point. Plus, between generative AI, directed manipulation, and generally low levels of media literacy, history and its record have become somewhat malleable.

When we're the paywall, how do we ensure we can share responsibly

Self-hosting sells the dream of self-sufficiency, which is fine, but lets not pretend it's not work, piled on top of more work, with some work on the side. I love learning new tools and features, but the ongoing maintenance? Nope, nope, nope. Someone else can do that, and if I have to subscribe to get that, I will. I just won't use the cloud as my primary backup, which can sync to my NAS to have a copy if the worst happens.

It's another layer of privilege that many who are trapped using cloud services don't have access to, and I can't help but wonder if the answer isn't self-hosting but ethical, affordable cloud services built for the benefit of the community and society as a whole, without the spectre of using all known customer data to sell targeted advertising for more things that we only rent, not own.