Building My Own Personal Cloud (One Pod at a Time)
Over the past couple of weeks, I took my first steps into owning more of the media I consume. Like my music, for which I've gone back to buy it in physical form. The grander goal of this is to become less dependent on the "big tech bros", especially those from outside of Europe. While streaming media might be convenient (although it has become less so with all the fragmentation over multiple services), I also realized I have nothing left when a streaming company decides to pull back (some of) the music I often listen to. In addition to owning the music in the form of physical media (CD and vinyl), I've digitized part of it and now run it on a personal Navidrome music server I can access everywhere I have an internet connection.
But there is more in the digital world than music. My content lives largely on this Bear blog, a platform I do trust my words with, and it's fairly easy to export all of it whenever I want, in a format that is recognized and used everywhere.
For writing this content, until now, I've used Quack, a Markdown editor made by the lovely people of Good Enough. A good solution for sure, but fueled by the self-hosting of my music, I started to look around for options to own this part of my blog-writing process. As my music was already streaming through a PikaPod, I did some research into what other services they offer and stumbled upon the option to fire up a PikaPod with the flatnotes Markdown editor. The blog post you're reading now has been written there, and I added a subdomain to make it part of my own "online space".
Since then, I've added more services in the same way: Blinko for taking notes instead of Google Keep, Readeck to clip web content instead of something like Pocket or Evernote, Code Server to tinker with (Python) code in the browser instead of VS Code Web hosted by Microsoft, and PdfDing to tinker with PDF files instead of using Google Drive or Adobe.
Setting up my own services like this feels like I take back control in some way. For now, I still use service providers instead of having a NAS, for example, but that might change in the future. PikaPods at least allows me to own my data, as I'm able to get all of it out of the pods via an SFTP connection and back it up somewhere else.
These are all first steps, I know.
But all adventurous journeys start with a single step.