Freedom and Isolation
In recent years, my life—particularly when it comes to social media—has become much more restricted. By deleting my accounts from all the so-called “popular” platforms, I found a new “home” in the fediverse: Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, Lemmy, and Peertube. However, I eventually realized that my overall desire to be social and my willingness to share ideas and thoughts had gradually faded. While my posts on Mastodon were never completely absent—far from it—they became increasingly rare and irregular.
With more free time on my hands, I immersed myself in the world of self-hosting. Equipped with a small Proxmox server, a WireGuard VPN, and a Nginx Proxy Manager, I was ready to dive in. I returned to being a quiet observer, curating a long list of creators to follow, using a robust RSS feed reader (FreshRSS), setting up a YouTube interface (Invidious), and maintaining a collection of podcasts to enjoy at any time of the day (Podgrab). I deployed around thirty LXC and Docker containers as if there were no tomorrow.
Self-hosting has been, without a doubt, the best choice for me. It has deepened my understanding of Docker to the point where creating containers from scratch now feels second nature. Even managing SSL certificates, once a daunting task, has become simple—just a matter of a few steps. Thanks to Grafana for monitoring stats and Elastic for handling logs.
What surprised me the most, though, is that managing everything locally and limiting myself to the fediverse helped me realize just how much social media had become a literal “waste of time” for me. A “waste of time,” yet a necessary one for existence.
Am I freer today than I was before? Perhaps. But I’m still figuring it out.