I'm a mechanic.

This is both my reason and explanation lol.

I do my own work has been said to be taken a bit too literally in my case. I got ripped off by Geek Squad when I was 18 and said "wow, it's just like getting ripped off at a shitty mechanic shop" and ever since then it's been all hands-on.

career

I sat on that fence but being a mechanic gives me guaranteed work and I basically work-out every day. It's hard, but not brutal and the pay is decent. Surrounded by maga tho.

Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.

I'm a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.

From there, the possibilities seemed endless.

as a student, this is much more interesting than studying

I've been a media hoarder for decades, my partner is an avid dvd collector. I used to have lofty goals with friends about setting up our own server and media centers so we didn't have to afford the world we live in. The friends fell off along the way, but I finally managed to make the dream happen. It's bittersweet that I don't really have anyone to celebrate it with.

-Cable is insanity. It's companies are corrupt and awful.

-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?

-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.

Lemmy has been a big part of it.

I've never been fond of paying big tech to spy on me. It has been getting gradually more expensive and more intrusive for years. Around the time I reached a breaking point, folks here helped me realize that digital sovereignty is possible.

One day I was just like, "Why does Google need to know when my lightswich is on?" And that was the start of it.

Well… I bought a Philips hue starter set. And I had heard of mqtt, zigbee and pihole. And I had a spare raspberry pi.

Now that got out of hand and I am looking at a proxmox cluster….

I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one

As a kid, dad set me up on one of his spare dos/win3.1 PCs when he was working. The passion and learning never stopped from that point. Just not something I want to make a career of.

Piracy, basically.

Self-hosting wasn't my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.

Privacy and ownership

Mostly gaming. I self-host three different game servers (Palworld, Minecraft and Terraria on occasion) and will be adding a TeamSpeak server soon to replace discord. Is it the best? Prolly not, but audio chat is all we really use Discord for anyway so we don't need the full feature stack.

I've always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It's so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.

I'm a teacher too. Started feeling burnt out a few years ago and considered a career change to tech. Didn't make the jump but did gain a new hobby and a love for privacy, owning my own things, and happy blinking lights in a rack. Still not as jazzed about teaching as I used to be, but making time to work on projects that have clear, achievable goals has been good for me.

Linux initially, giving way for me to see that the best alternatives to me are generally the ones I control.

And considering geopolitics, where I can see how dangerous a well-positioned spy/saboteur/paid actor can be, my next self host project is some ActivityPub social media, at least as an one-user instance since I don't want to act as a company yet, so I have control of where I'm posting from too.

Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it's been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.

I fucking hate tech companies

I didn't want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc... And that's also how I ended up with a career in IT.

I'm a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I've always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.

And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz

Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.

I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica's black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that's like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you're downloading our music on Napster, then we don't want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find "alternative methods" for every piece of digital media I could, if that's how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.

I still download and share all of Metallica's discography out of spite, but haven't listened to them since.

I'm not in a tech field now, but I used to be. I jumped ship when everything started moving to 'cloud based' because I don't trust anything I can't kick when it breaks.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #87 for this comm, first seen 12th Feb 2026, 16:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Getting out of the grasp of big tech.

Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day

I work in advertising

I wanted more Dropbox space. Self hosted Nextcloud when Docker became a thing.

Ended up getting a job in tech as I got better with containerization and better at programming from scripting and reading Data Structures books

Getting sick of google having a degree of control over my data and the increasing AI being jammed down everyones throats. Combined with the keylogging keyboards and OS's which are becoming more and more invasive by the month. Time for some liberation. I also enjoy learning coding, docker, networking etc. Cost is another factor. Although I could lie and say a 1 time fee for a server will be cheaper than Google One. Yeh it was at the start on paper but realistically after you upgrade drives and ram and buy backup drive etc it does start to add up.

Lack of trust, for the most part. I've been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it's Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or "friends" and family making life difficult, I've learned the hard way over the years I can't rely fully on anything not under my control.

I got laid off and needed something to do.

I'm an industrial engineer who was hanging out on lemmy and my IT guy was talking about his piracy server, and well I thought that a legitimately aquired media server might be nice, and that home assistant thing sounded cool so he gave me the form to get two used desktops for free from the company. And well now I'm still fucking around with them every once in a while in anticipation for when my space will warrant actually using them full time.

It also helps that my local bdsm community had had self hosters who talked about it for years.

hating the anti-christ

I couldn't think about leaving my personal data to the Big Tech...