Date: 2025/01/14 - Digital survivalism? - Themes: selfhosting, opinions, word-ism.

---

start with a podcast

I heard about the name and term "linux prepper" and i think i liked it. That could be the title of the article.

When i wrote back the whole article about selfhosting i found that whole praise around it was a bit too much but i was just happy to share that my itch got scratched and healed well.

i dont mock preppers, survivalists and such; i not always understand some details, as each one is different and have different threat model. I'm sensible to some threats and could react like one under stress i think.

There's a podcast called Linux Prepper. The name is really something. I wanna talk about this.

A prepper is someone that prepare themselves. the one i talk about are the ones that prepare themselves to a major even, could be a war, a cataclysm, even a minor emergency.

Why we selfhost? i would say to reclaim the things that belong to us. Be in control of our stuff. which totally match the preppy thing. People prep to be in control of their future narrative.

Is that digital survivalism

I'm not sure, that would be some overlap on people into mesh networking i think. It is a form of survivalism yes. The first step? Maybe.
Selfhosting is the answer to losing comfort of centralized webhosting. That could be a threat yes. Like be unable to retrive an important paper you carefully put on a online drive. You don't control the narrative if somehow this online drive had deleted your stuff over some obscure reasons, if the website is blocked in that region.

common sense & farfetched ideas

Using a dumbphone, being privacy conscious, and using desktop *BSD, selfhosting with a OpenWRT router and having fun by learning RISC-V instructions might not be digital survivalism but just common sense.

Okey, this situation might be farfetched lol. But here i am:

A privacy conscious individual that use Linux, selfhosting using a old laptop, and having fun learning self reliance. Yeah sure i'm interested into 'low and middle tech'.

Being into Free Software is more common sense to me but if you see the fire coming about an expensive licensed software that might be obsolete in the nearest future and got the urge of finding a solution even radical one and this minor thing is starting to make your whole world crumble, yes. that might be a prepper urge.

On other hand my trust in VPS providers is really thin and i would of course wear my cool tinfoil hat when i talk about selfhosting.

More

While selfhosting got me cured of overthinking about a lot of stuff. I would love to learn more about mesh networking and the real use cases for normal individuals, i like what i read about guifi and freifunk info pages. i like what i read about meshtastic. But i don't have any itch that would make me step to it out of despair, yet.

Low tech is nice, middle is interesting, we lost sight on high