alt Hacker News> I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech?
If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.
If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here.
When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses.
Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.
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I am talking about many things. Also about my programs, but also data. Programs are not that important for me. They are just vehicles to get the job done.
All my programs and data are open. It is something that anybody can pick up, and use as they wish
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - domains I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - feeds I found
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - news from 2026
- https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - news from 2025, etc.
Does make any change? I don't know. I run web crawlers. It is interesting for me to see what my crawlers pick up from the Internet. It did change my life, these project changed how I see the Internet. More pro-activly.
I think there are many projects which can be useful for niche groups. I suppose I have 390 stars on one repo. I hope at least my projects were useful for them. That is a hopeful thought.
> If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.
Can I do it on my phone?
Anyone will be able to lob legal complaints against your self-hosted mastodon instance if they don't like you, which will bring cops to your door like milkshake brings boys to the yard.
In a world where big tech and governments are requiring user-facing things to do things (like age verification, etc) and be liable for what their users do with it, even the self-host becomes a problem unless you are your only user. There are plenty of people that are still doing it, but they're probably taking on liability they don't realize. For example if I stand up a self-hosted git forge and allow others to use it, and some user I don't know commits CSAM to their repo, to quote (paraphrased cause I don't remember exactly) Dijkstra from The Witcher: That's called being in the shit, and you're in the shit.