Sovereignty

I have finally reached my limit

I’m not sure yet if I will share this on LinkedIn, namely due to the slight irony in sharing it there and what the post will talk about. But in the last few weeks, I’ve finally reached my limit with regards the state of the Internet. If you’ve read my posts before, you understand that I do a certain degree of self hosting. So I would self host some services but not all. Recent events have almost pushed me into a radicalisation phase, for lack of a better phrase, with regards self hosting.

It’s been building slowly over time these feelings. I mean, of course they have been if I’ve been on some form of my self hosting journey for the past..seven or eight years (good God that’s an age) but lately it’s just been getting far too much. GitHub for example, has broadened the scope of the data processing they will do in the name of improving Copilot. Which there is an opt-out, but it doesn’t leave me feeling great? I’m also in a position where my Copilot license comes from $work, so since the recent changes only apply to personal licenses only, I don’t see the opt-out in my settings. So from my perspective, I have no way of actually stopping this.

There was also the recent introduction of ads inside pull requests I think either when the PR was opened by Copilot, or also PRs not opened by Copilot. I think it was the latter that ended up prompting this to be noticed. So of course, they walked back, but you know it won’t be a forever walk back. They’ll figure things out and give it another go. I’m left wondering what will be next. And I’m also just so fed up with waking up every day wondering what will be the next thing that I see that makes my head explode.

The prior weekend to this post was poor for my mental health. I can keep things in check with coping strategies, but they failed a bit on Saturday as my anxiety sky rocketed. I was pacing around our living room on a semi rant to my non-technical father, who did his best to smile and nod along. Thankfully I didn’t have an outright panic attack, but ultimately I completely tired my brain out, ended up in bed for the rest of the day in the dark. I was struggling with the concepts of trying to go further in my self hosting endeavours. I know I can do it, but I also know I can screw up and lose data. When it comes to code and version control, it’s almost up there with photos for me in terms of worry. Not to mention the sheer scale of decisions to make, the choice paralysis of what I should do to start making the change, did not help either.

I’m still feeling unsure. I’m still feeling anxious about it all. I’m still thinking it’s the right thing to do. I’m still gonna try.

I’m viewing these next few weeks efforts as the start of building my own foundation for a self hosted and sovereign stack of tooling. An investment that right now seems scary but in six to twelve months time I will likely look back on as one of the best investments I made. It’s scary, but I just have to start and I will get into a groove then. I am going to be deploying GitLab to act as my alternative to GitHub. Before you start pitchforking that GitLab is a terrible decision, for one it’s a tool I’ve experience with in the past. Two, it offers multiple solutions for alternatives to GitHub and Terraform. Three, if it turns out to be a bad decision, I can rearchitect at a later date. I don’t need to get things exactly right the first time.

I’m also going to start prioritising European alternatives to services. This website runs on AWS and I want to update that to a European provider, I have a frontrunner in mind too. I don’t think I can preach about being sovereign and using Europe where possible, when my own back yard isn’t in order. There’s a lot of flavours on the sovereignty debate. I’ve seen it go so far as the hardware itself you’re using. Which, I wish you all the best on that front, but as one person I don’t exactly have the time, effort and/or money to change all that. My aims when it comes to sovereign solutions are:

• The metal where services run should either be in my home or on a European provider
• The service providers I use should ideally be European, but if there’s no option for me in a particular area, I will just have to settle.

I think GitLab is an American company, or is at least for profit anyway. But I don’t think I’ve the inclination to really target my software supply chain here. Maybe that will change. But at the end of the day I can install GitLab, I can firewall it off to the rest of the world, just have it live on my Tailnet forever.

I’ve spun up a bare metal server on Scaleway as my starting point for my GitLab deployment. I’ve avoided deploying GitLab at home for now because I think I would need to enter the memory tuning game straight away and I don’t want to do that, I’m more interested in migrating away from GitHub. My intent as well is to see how the server load settles on that system, then perform memory tuning and consider a move of the tool back home. But again that’s still up to debate in my mind, handling my own codebases I might want to rely on providers that have you know, more than one power supply in their data centres. Basically I think GitLab will have to be one of my as reliable as possible services.

Something to tackle as well will be owning my own music collection. There are more avenues to legitimate music ownership on the digital front than I realised. I’ve fully reached the stage of knowing I just simply rent my music from Apple Music and I don’t want to rent anymore. I want to own. So, that’ll be another project for me to do.

I will have to sit down and do a mapping of what else there is. I need to fully understand my exposure I guess. Then tackle things as time goes on. I’m still feeling unsure. I’m still feeling anxious about it all. I’m still thinking it’s the right thing to do. I’m still gonna try.