It can be. Controlling your own devices enables you to reject planned obsolescence, which produces unnecessary e-waste. It also allows you to avoid having unwanted “generative AI” features, which are responsible for a lot of electricity and hardware consumption.
Thanks. Privacy can be one benefit of controlling your own computing. I also aim to promote subject matter that is more accessible to people with less technical expertise, whereas self-hosting seems to involve quite a bit of technical experience.
I created the comm after realising that a lot of the problems that people are raising (very valid) concerns about in recent times (declining quality of platforms, privacy issues, etc) all stem from a root cause, that being the transfer of computing tasks to centralised platforms.
Thanks for commenting. I checked my comment, and it seems I did just write “Internet connection” - just a mistake from rewriting the comment and not leaving it in a coherent state. Sorry about that.
I use the Internet daily as well. I’d just like to avoid being locked-in to some remote service.
For someone to participate in this subreddit, they only need to want to rely more on hardware/software that they control instead of those controlled by someone else. As for why they might want this - different people might have different reasons.
A few possible reasons people might be interested:
But the community is open to members regardless of why they are interested.
Red Flags:
Using Kiwix you can keep older versions of Wikipedia locally on your computer, so if the online version reaches an unusable state, you can still view the articles as they used to be. Of course, it won’t have information about anything that happened after that point, but it could still be useful for some purposes.