I have been thinking a lot about digital sovereignty lately and how quickly the internet is turning into a weird blend of surreal slop and centralized control. It feels like we are losing the ability to tell what is real because of how easy it is for trillionaire tech companies to flood our feeds with whatever they want.

Specifically I am curious about what I call “kirkification” which is the way these tools make it trivial to warp a person’s digital identity into a caricature. It starts with a joke or a face swap but it ends with people losing control over how they are perceived online.

If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?

I want to know if anyone here has tried moving away from the cloud toward sovereign compute. Is hosting our own communication and media solutions actually a viable way to starve these massive models of our data? Can a small town actually manage its own digital utility instead of just being a data farm for big tech?

Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?

It seems like we should be aiming for a world of a million millionaires rather than just a room full of trillionaires but the technical hurdles like isp throttling and protocol issues make that bridge hard to build.

Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai? I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity and keep our data grounded in meatspace.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 day ago

    Sure, rent a cloud server for $10/month, install Docker/Podman then all self hosted services you need. Invite people on your Jitsi Meet server, publish your videos on PeerTube, work via NextCloud, etc. It’s not easy the first time but with each (well documented) step it becomes easier. Most important : backup your data.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        4·
        22 hours ago

        That’s actually my recommendation yes.

        If somehow after a month you feel like you do want this “lifestyle”, are comfortable with setting up a VPN (if you need external access) THEN spend more and get your a SBI like a RPi and have it at home. If that’s still not enough then go up to a proper server you host, use a non commercial ISP, etc … but IMHO don’t start with a server at home if you are not familiar with all this, it’s counter intuitively harder and definitely more expensive.

        Also FWIW you should still have an offsite backup regardless of how you do it.

        • SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world
          3·
          19 hours ago

          I get where you’re coming from (and why) but am of the “rip the bandaid off clean in one go” school of thought.

          A smaller start (like using that RPI to self host Jellyfin server for your home) puts you on the road to sovereignty straight away. A Pi 4 costs what…$60 (plus $30 for power supply and SD card)? Hell, use an old laptop.

          Once you have one thing running, your on the right path for the next and the next.

          Doing it on the cloud I think is paradoxically harder and ultimately self defeating.

          Don’t get me wrong - if you need the cloud (say, you need to rent a H100 for a few hours to fine tune your LLM), I’m all for it. But if sovereignty is to goal - and the gateway drug is a SBC and a few days / weeks of self learning…you may as well start eating the elephant. IMHO and YMMV of course.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
            1·
            12 hours ago

            IMHO the key aspect isn’t where you host things but rather understanding how hosting itself works.

            To me the most challenging aspects are how to :

            • route traffic
            • start a service
            • backup your data

            and also ideally

            • have more than 1 service on a single machine
            • restore your data
            • restore your entire setup

            For that very first step I would say having a machine directly exposed to the Internet makes it easier. I don’t know what ISP you use but at least in Belgium where I’m currently located all ports are closed and IP are dynamic. That means if you want to show your freshly started Apache Web server to your mother in law it will challenging.

            Meanwhile if you do manage to get to the last step, namely restore your entire setup, then restoring to a cloud service or a RPi is the same, you transfer your data, start your services and voila, you are back either LAN only or on the entire Internet via a cloud provider.

            So autonomy isn’t as much as to where things are physically hosted and by whom as in the actual capacity to able to host there or elsewhere.

            Finally if you are using a commercial ISP, as opposed to having your own AS, are you really self-hosting?