I’m a techie by trade who matured using proprietary technologies like Windows, but reached my breaking point once ads were introduced at the OS level. Since then I’ve been on something of a personal vendetta against big tech. It’s been about 4 years now, and I thought I’d share my experience.

My first and predominant interest was securing a means of private communication that wasn’t centralised. Like many before me, I stumbled upon Matrix. Adoption was problematic; I couldn’t help people understand why using WhatsApp, Discord, etc. was a bad idea. But ultimately I managed to convince most of the people in my circle to migrate to my Matrix server by adding IdP (using Keycloak). The login is also tied to various other services, but the carrot that drew most of them in was my Jellyfin instance.

It’s running on a home server with ~60TB of hard drive space, and each user also has access to Seerr for requesting content, so it’s become quite an extensive library over time. Building the server cost somewhere in the region of 5k to set up (it hosts far more than just Jellyfin), plus a small monthly fee for the VPS I use as a reverse proxy. I offer everything free of charge as a labour of love for the people I care about.

I also provide free tech support to any of my users running any instance of Linux, both hardware and software. Windows users are advised to search their issues online, or allow me to install a dualboot Linux option to help them reach a resolution. I even go as far as offering a free 256GB NVMe for this purpose, provided they’ve a free M2 slot in their builds.

In my experience, bringing the layperson into the open source world is definitely possible, but it comes at great personal expense. People don’t like change, but evidently they hate adverts even more so.

I’m keen to hear about others with similar experiences this far down the rabbit hole. what have you found that works in helping with wider adoption of open source technologies in your communities?

  • hamsda ( hamsda@feddit.org ) 
    7·
    3 months ago

    I’d really love to get all my people to use FOSS software or, at the very least, stop using WhatsApp and Co and switch to Signal.

    The thing is, most people (including my people) just don’t care. At all.

    The response is always one of these:

    • I don’t care, let them read all I send / see all I do
    • You’re just paranoid because you’re working in IT
    • You can just ignore the ads
    • You just gotta deal with it

    It got to a point where it became so frustrating and the “paranoid” bit just pissing me off so much, I gave up. I don’t even talk about IT anymore with them, they wouldn’t (want to) understand anyway.

    I feel like I’m on the only inhabitant of an island in the middle of the ocean.

    I honestly think the only way to get people to care is, if the consequences themselves kick these people between the legs. Which will probably not happen in a way where they would understand “this wouldn’t have happened with FOSS software”.

  • 5PACEBAR ( 5PACEBAR@piefed.ca ) English
    6·
    3 months ago

    hahaha well met I’ve been doing the exact same thing 😂

    Come for the Jellyfin Stay for the free services (Matrix, Nextcloud, Fedi…) IdP is Authentik

    • Transparent_knoll ( Transparent_knoll@awful.systems ) OP
      2·
      3 months ago

      Glad to hear others are doing the same! I actually started out with authentik, but just could not get emails to play ball. It was no doubt something I was doing wrong though, as I remember finding nobody else with the same issues when trawling support forums, which is why I ultimately jumped to keycloak.

      I definitely prefer the customisation in authentik to keycloak. I have to use a git project for compiling my keycloak ‘theme’, that allows basic UI changes like logos. Safe to say the theme hasn’t changed since it was first setup.

  • hexagonwin ( hexagonwin@lemmy.today ) 
    3·
    3 months ago

    Building the server cost somewhere in the region of 5k to set up (it hosts far more than just Jellyfin), plus a small monthly fee for the VPS I use as a reverse proxy. I offer everything free of charge as a labour of love for the people I care about.

    I also provide free tech support to any of my users running any instance of Linux, both hardware and software.

    man youre a fucking angel! mad respect

    • Transparent_knoll ( Transparent_knoll@awful.systems ) OP
      2·
      3 months ago

      Haha, thanks; I’m certain I’m not the only techie fighting big tech in this way, and if I can help other self hosters on the journey, I’m more than happy to.

      The real angels are the many unsung heroes that develop these open source projects. Without their dedication to the good fight, people like me wouldn’t be able to do what we do.

    • Transparent_knoll ( Transparent_knoll@awful.systems ) OP
      4·
      3 months ago

      Its pretty rudimentary reverse proxy via VPN setup. Just Client - VPS - server, using a separate wireguard connection for each service for a zero trust setup.

      I’m using an oldish github project called selfhosted-gateway for setup. It hasn’t been updated in some time, but I’m still using it as the overhead on the VPS side is tiny compared to any other solution (like netbird for example) and honestly, it just works.

      The setup is pretty simple, a docker container for the wireguard setup Is spun up on both sides creating a wireguard tunnel, with the home server container running nginx, that will expose the relevant container depending on config. The VPS side uses caddy which automatically handles TLS too, so its a quick and easy implementation once you get your head around it.