I wrote this piece in 2018. It is by no means perfect. I am posting it here now because I keep seeing a lot of people - even technologically literate people - being very confused about what the cloud does and what it means with respect to privacy, security and reliability. It is truly unfortunate that these old lessons are still not being learned.
I can have my own story on this. When Apple decided to do the csam detection, in other words, I was guilty until proven innocent, I decided to take all of my contacts, photos and calendar appointments and host them on my own server. Other than when I am stupid, which sometimes happens, my down time has been actually far less than when I was using Apple. Apple. Every time they did a stupid iCal upgrade. My darn calendars wouldn’t get all messed up. Since I’ve been using radicale, my calendar is almost 100% reliable. And what’s even nicer. A copy is stored on each local device. So even if my server goes down, I still have my calendar entries. For photos, I simply use sync thing. For my contacts. I also use radicale. I’m getting ready to do my own mail but that’s a bit of a hassle. I did find this very nice one in fosdem 2025 called stalwart mail. It’s written in rust and it looks like it’s probably the nicest one I’ve seen. I basically have a lot of cisadment experience so I don’t mind running a bare metal box for $50 a month. I get 100 terabytes of download, or upload in that case, 24. Gigs of RAM, and 24. Of processor, 256 gigs of SSD, + 2 TB of magnetic disc. More than enough to do all these things with plenty of room to spare. To do something like at Amazon would be 10 times the cost. And I don’t control it at that point. I use Alpine as my underlying OS, and I’m probably going to might be migrating from libvirt 2 to incus.
I wrote this piece in 2018. It is by no means perfect. I am posting it here now because I keep seeing a lot of people - even technologically literate people - being very confused about what the cloud does and what it means with respect to privacy, security and reliability. It is truly unfortunate that these old lessons are still not being learned.
I can have my own story on this. When Apple decided to do the csam detection, in other words, I was guilty until proven innocent, I decided to take all of my contacts, photos and calendar appointments and host them on my own server. Other than when I am stupid, which sometimes happens, my down time has been actually far less than when I was using Apple. Apple. Every time they did a stupid iCal upgrade. My darn calendars wouldn’t get all messed up. Since I’ve been using radicale, my calendar is almost 100% reliable. And what’s even nicer. A copy is stored on each local device. So even if my server goes down, I still have my calendar entries. For photos, I simply use sync thing. For my contacts. I also use radicale. I’m getting ready to do my own mail but that’s a bit of a hassle. I did find this very nice one in fosdem 2025 called stalwart mail. It’s written in rust and it looks like it’s probably the nicest one I’ve seen. I basically have a lot of cisadment experience so I don’t mind running a bare metal box for $50 a month. I get 100 terabytes of download, or upload in that case, 24. Gigs of RAM, and 24. Of processor, 256 gigs of SSD, + 2 TB of magnetic disc. More than enough to do all these things with plenty of room to spare. To do something like at Amazon would be 10 times the cost. And I don’t control it at that point. I use Alpine as my underlying OS, and I’m probably going to might be migrating from libvirt 2 to incus.