I’m a techie by trade who matured using proprietary technologies like Windows, but reached my breaking point once ads were introduced at the OS level. Since then I’ve been on something of a personal vendetta against big tech. It’s been about 4 years now, and I thought I’d share my experience.
My first and predominant interest was securing a means of private communication that wasn’t centralised. Like many before me, I stumbled upon Matrix. Adoption was problematic; I couldn’t help people understand why using WhatsApp, Discord, etc. was a bad idea. But ultimately I managed to convince most of the people in my circle to migrate to my Matrix server by adding IdP (using Keycloak). The login is also tied to various other services, but the carrot that drew most of them in was my Jellyfin instance.
It’s running on a home server with ~60TB of hard drive space, and each user also has access to Seerr for requesting content, so it’s become quite an extensive library over time. Building the server cost somewhere in the region of 5k to set up (it hosts far more than just Jellyfin), plus a small monthly fee for the VPS I use as a reverse proxy. I offer everything free of charge as a labour of love for the people I care about.
I also provide free tech support to any of my users running any instance of Linux, both hardware and software. Windows users are advised to search their issues online, or allow me to install a dualboot Linux option to help them reach a resolution. I even go as far as offering a free 256GB NVMe for this purpose, provided they’ve a free M2 slot in their builds.
In my experience, bringing the layperson into the open source world is definitely possible, but it comes at great personal expense. People don’t like change, but evidently they hate adverts even more so.
I’m keen to hear about others with similar experiences this far down the rabbit hole. what have you found that works in helping with wider adoption of open source technologies in your communities?
Hey I’ve been thinking of a similar setup.
For media, and with storage prices being what they are, I was going to forego redundancy for a while.
Do you have a list of media and torrents / usenet indexes that you back up?
I’m wondering how I can easily or even auto Aye redownloading media if a disk blows up.
I use prowlarr to manage my sources, and that container in its entirety is backed up, so if the whole unit were to die simultaneously. I would lose all content, but retain all setup.
The key part for my recovery method is my Arr stack (prowlarr, sonarr, radarr). Loading up sonarr/radarr shows the entire catalogue of content; and highlights/ can search for any that are missing; so once the media drives been replaced its as easy as pressing a button.
If you’re just getting started. I’d recommend checking out yams.media. it provides a strong starting stack including arr containers, vpn setup etc… Its a strong foundation for a successful media server. I believe it also has media separated from app data, which makes a setup like this easy to achieve.