but wait there's more!

Okay, okay, I know I could have unpublished the first post, edited it, and then reposted—but nahhh, I think this is better. The thing is, after I published, I realized the whole post was all about HOW and not WHY. And the WHY actually matters a lot. At least from my perspective…

So why am I doing this? Why go through all this trouble to self-host and rebuild a media server stack from scratch? Well, let's back up a bit and I'll show you how I got here.

Some Background

My history of building media servers goes way back—all the way to 2002 with Windows Media Center. The idea of being able to access the things we already had at home (mostly music and a little video) was pretty novel, at least to me. Windows Media Center was my gateway app. From there, I tinkered with Xbox Media Center, Kodi, and other projects, including Windows Home Server, which eventually got absorbed into the product I worked on at Microsoft—Windows Small Business Server.

Eventually, though, life shifted with kids, surfing, and travel, and I kind of stopped. It was just a hobby, and in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t seem all that important.

Pandemic Changes Everything

Lockdowns and authoritarian governmental policies really shook me. I never thought something like that would ever happen in my lifetime. Sovereignty and the question of what money truly is became a big issue, and I started picking up things I had set aside, like Bitcoin.

This led almost immediately to wanting to run my own node, and a new gateway emerged—Umbrel. I had a Raspberry Pi lying around doing nothing, so I started researching and found Umbrel, which is essentially a home server OS. Hosting a Bitcoin node was easy this way—just a couple of clicks, and you were off to the races. Lightning node? No problem. Adding BTC Pay Server? Yup, easy peasy.

This was fun, and I discovered a whole world of media related servers that had come into being while I was off doing other things.

Big Money and Big Data Go Hand in Hand

With the pandemic, everything we thought we knew or relied on came into question. The innocent ideas around the cloud and the companies I had worked for or with—and their supposedly "free" services—needed serious reevaluation.

One day, we as a family decided we were not only going to try to leave the big money system, but we were also going to move as far away from big data as we could. We weren’t just going to be self-reliant on our little farm—we were going to be as self-reliant as possible with our technology. No more subscriptions, no more Netflix, no more cloud. Not Microsoft (been there since Hotmail), not Google, not Office 365.

We were diving into this beautiful world of open source, decentralized, and self-hosted technology.

This Is What Led to the Media Server Stack

While running a Bitcoin node was my entry point back into this world, for most people, it's a media server. They either have music, photos, or movies sitting on hard drives and want a TV-friendly way or mobile app to engage with that data.

I had all of that and more—terabytes of it, in fact. Very quickly, I started to bump into the ceiling with Umbrel. I wanted more recent versions of the services I was running; more control over how they were deployed, and more insight into what was happening. That led me down the Linux/Docker rabbit hole.

Eventually, I ditched Windows entirely (even on my laptop), built my own NAS, and now run more than a few dedicated Linux boxes as Docker hosts. Today, I control my streaming, my audiobooks, my music services, my solar system, and most importantly, my data.

Don’t get me wrong—I still use the internet, so there is some cloud-based infrastructure and services (hello YouTube) that I use and, in some cases, require. But overall, I am a lot more sovereign today than I was in 2020 and better off in almost every way.

Join the Revolution

Take control of your data and support open-source, self-hosted services. The internet needs to be as decentralized as possible before the next excuse to take away our freedom is found.

And by the way, Part 2 of this series will be dropping next Monday, with a new part coming every Monday after that. Stay tuned!