It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what I am trying to do for myself is to "disconnect from the internet". That's not really true. The internet is wonderful and I want to participate in a lot of what it has to offer. I do want to remove myself from the corporate internet; that is, the dystopia of web apps that track you as you navigate the web. Like the tools that promise the world but quickly attempt to monetize your activity and forsake some or all of the things that made them worth using. Or media apps that force feed you mediocre "content" created by people just to serve the underlying algorithm. Getting onto SDF and participating here is part of my journey away from that sort of desolate web. Another part is building out a home server that can take serve some of the needs that these megacorps currently do. I don't really want to depend on netflix or disney to entertain me via streaming. They should go make media, I'll worry about purchasing/acquiring it and getting it onto a screen. At the moment I've got Jellyfin setup on a Raspberry Pi with some movies, books, and music. It's sitting inside of a Tailscale mesh network so that I can use it outside of my home network and I have really been enjoying it. Yes, there's work involved in setting it up; getting the media, making sure the metadata looks good, and then doing the file transfers. But it kind of reminds me of getting into vinyl (which is so weird considering the fact that getting into vinyl was my reaction to the digitization of everything haha). I think that it scratches that itch of being more connected to and invested in what I am consuming. I also own this stuff and am not worried about the overlords removing them from the platforms. I'm starting to explore the idea of building out a more robust homelab. Maybe an Intel NUC or even an old HP Prodesk or Lenovo mini PC. Stay tuned I guess (if you are reading and interested anyway).