The future is not self-hosted

Summary

Hey friends 👋,A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers. Thankfully, I still have access to my library because I saw this video by Jared Henderson warning of the change and downloaded all ~400 of my books immediately.But for those that didn't, the only way for them to view the books they own is through a Kindle or the Kindle app.Which raises the question: do they even own those books?If you can only access an item through an intermediary that decides the terms and means of your access, I'd say no. You don't own your books on Kindle. You rent them from Amazon.And Amazon agrees with this. When they closed this direct way for users to access their eBooks, they also updated the language in the Kindle store to say users are purchasing licenses – not books!Now, this isn't new. Companies like Amazon have been playing dirty with Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the Internet's inception. Purchased digital goods have always been licenses more than owned assets.What's changed is they're bold enough now to say the quiet part out loud: that we own nothing.But this situation extends beyond the realms of media. Even your own data: your documents in Dropbox or Google Drive, your photos in iCloud or Google Photos, your emails, chat history, everything is rented space on these large corporations computers.And at any point, they can choose to change the terms and conditions of that rental agreement. They can (and I'm sure they do) train AI models on all of your content. They can (and do) change the pricing tiers for their plans to upsell you. They can (and do) make it extremely difficult to migrate to different services.In our techno-feudalistic dystopia, they're the landlords. We're the serfs.But over the past few weeks – with the help of a growing group of rebels fighting to take back ownership and control over their digital lives – I did something radical: I built my own cloud.My...