Digital Homesteading 1: Introduction By Edward Willis (http://encw.xyz) Published Jan/24/2023 Recently Lunduke (lunduke.com) has started an article series about what he calls Digital Prepping. Defined as preparing in case internet was to go off, either temporarily, or permanently. A worthy and interesting goal to be sure. I have a similar but somewhat different idea that I call Digital Homesteading. The idea isn't so much to prepare for the internet to go off, but rather to reduce one's use and need of it, on an ongoing basis. What follows is just an introduction to the concept. Digital Homesteading has a goal of providing for yourself. In practice this has two parts, personal and public: 1.) Personal. Actively going off-grid, or at least off-line, for one's own computing. In practice this often means home servers running services that do not require internet access. Think, for example, replacing Dropbox with self-hosted NextCloud. Another way to reduce your reliance on the internet is to replace software that requires the internet with software that does not. 2.) Public. Reducing your reliance on tech services, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, for your on-line presence. And eventually, if applicable and reasonable, reducing your reliance on cloud hosting providers for your internet facing servers. Giving tech companies control over your on-line presence gives them control over your speech, and with most people in society doing it, it gives them control over society itself. I reckon the first part, personal digital homesteading, as being the more important of the two. Being able to keep your computer use off the internet not only makes your computer use more resilient to your internet connection slowing down, glitching, or going offline, but it also protects you from prying eyes and service security breaches. Furthermore, hosting your own data maintains YOUR exclusive control and ownership of it. Oh, and it also takes you off the subscription fee treadmill. Here is an (incomplete) list of things you might host for yourself: * Audio and video files/streaming to hosts on your network. * General use network attached storage * Dropbox substitute with NextCloud * Text and Audio communication service/s * Game servers * Repository mirrors for FOSS operating systems * Password management * Source code version control * Calendar and contacts It's also possible to make these services available when you're OUTSIDE the home using a VPN server. I wouldn't do this unless you really know what you are doing.