Digital Homesteading 1: Introduction
By Edward Willis (http://encw.xyz)
Published Jan/24/2023

Recently Lunduke (lunduke.com) has started an article series about what he calls
Digital Prepping. Defined as preparing in case internet was to go off, either
temporarily, or permanently. A worthy and interesting goal to be sure.

I have a similar but somewhat different idea that I call Digital Homesteading.
The idea isn't so much to prepare for the internet to go off, but rather to
reduce one's use and need of it, on an ongoing basis. What follows is just an
introduction to the concept.

Digital Homesteading has a goal of providing for yourself. In practice this has
two parts, personal and public:

1.) Personal. Actively going off-grid, or at least off-line, for one's own
computing. In practice this often means home servers running services that do
not require internet access. Think, for example, replacing Dropbox with
self-hosted NextCloud. Another way to reduce your reliance on the internet is to
replace software that requires the internet with software that does not.

2.) Public. Reducing your reliance on tech services, such as Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter, for your on-line presence. And eventually, if applicable
and reasonable, reducing your reliance on cloud hosting providers for your
internet facing servers. Giving tech companies control over your on-line
presence gives them control over your speech, and with most people in society
doing it, it gives them control over society itself. 

I reckon the first part, personal digital homesteading, as being the more
important of the two. Being able to keep your computer use off the internet not
only makes your computer use more resilient to your internet connection slowing
down, glitching, or going offline, but it also protects you from prying eyes and
service security breaches. Furthermore, hosting your own data maintains YOUR
exclusive control and ownership of it. Oh, and it also takes you off the
subscription fee treadmill.

Here is an (incomplete) list of things you might host for yourself:

 * Audio and video files/streaming to hosts on your network.
 * General use network attached storage
 * Dropbox substitute with NextCloud
 * Text and Audio communication service/s
 * Game servers
 * Repository mirrors for FOSS operating systems
 * Password management
 * Source code version control
 * Calendar and contacts

It's also possible to make these services available when you're OUTSIDE the home
using a VPN server. I wouldn't do this unless you really know what you are
doing.