Homelab: the enshittification antidote

I'm starting a series to talk about my homelab and projects. I'll be covering the general setup and various services along with the things I use every day on it.

But before diving into that, I was reflecting on how I came to have a half height server rack in my home office.

For most people who end up homelabbing, it starts small, it did for me at least.

Something 'always on' to store some files, run a small media server.

For me, it was a 4 bay QNAP NAS.
A small rectangle that sat on or under a desk.
For years, it perched on top my desktop case.

I could run some apps on it. I could do Raid 5 for a bit of redundancy should a disk fail. It had the general performance of a potato, but it was enough for SMB shares, DNLA and a few small local web apps.

Everything else was available on the internet. Cloud storage, no problem, free accounts, no problem.

Over the years, I got a newer model and a 5 bay expansion as data and disk count grew. DNLA became Plex with modest transcoding. A few more apps were added, but nothing major.

For decades that was fine.

Then one day, it wasn't.

The quotas started shrinking, the advertising increasingly intrusive. Free started becoming crippled as paid options appeared.

Tracking cookies. Advertising Ids, Unskippable ads, cookie banners with 50 individual opt out buttons, popup content blocking, browser extension blocking, fingerprinting. “Extras” autopopulated in your shopping baskets. Home conversations aligning with advertising.

Data mining, UX dark patterns and identity tracking was booming, so were the revenues it provided that further narrowed the funnels into which we were compartmentalized.

Search results crafted for advertisers rather than contextual relevance for controlling information, influence and commerce.

As platforms like Spotify, Amazon, Netflix began to eclipse the businesses that used to fuel them, the experience eventually became worse for everyone using it.

The frog boiled slowly though. I don't know exactly at what point I noticed the water was getting hotter. It wasn't a sudden realization, but gradually over time, but notice I did.

Over the years my browser switched a few times until it settled on Brave. I began to put custom firmware on my router with VPNs and traffic shaping. I began using email alias services and password managers for all accounts.
Furthermore, I switched over to VoIP and added caller announce features to stem the flow of spam and mobile apps were added to.

I ran telemetry disabling scripts on my desktop machines and disabled it in the opaque maze in online accounts.

I quit the social media platforms one by one or went into read-only mode, often via anonymous proxies to avoid being put in their algorithmic bubbles.

I began using price tracking applications that exposed the day-to-day dynamic pricing practices of retail.

Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in November 2022 to describe what I was instinctively reacting to.

Wikipedia defines this process as:

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

By the time I began to build out a homelab, I was already well down the road of understanding all the ways in which you are data mined, influenced and monetized online.

As someone in and of the tech industry, I was perhaps more aware than Joe public watching the process unfold. But Enshittification and degoogling content is now reaching far beyond those who followed Cory and the EFF since the boing boing days.

Influencers like Linus and PewDiePie talking about ditching google to their millions of viewers and seeing videos being taken down, the latter promoting GrapheneOS and developing their own LLM products. Gamers Nexus and Louis Rossmann are raising awareness of the onslaught of anti-consumer actions of big tech business against ownership, privacy and rights to repair.

YouTube creators like Level1Tech, Jeff Geerling, Techno Tim, Craft computing, Serve the home, NasCompares, Christian Lempa, Lawrence systems and many more have healthy growing subscriber and viewing numbers for homelab content.

The selfhost and homelab communities on Reddit are thriving.

It might not be Joe public mainstream, but it's got a growing audience.

It was just before COVID-19 when I began replacing most of my ancient hardware and properly building out a home lab.

I continued buying until early 2025, by which time, I had the bulk of my current setup running. AI had also entered the picture by this point, and I wanted to be able to run LLM's locally.

Turns out I was lucky to have bought plenty of RAM, GPU, and storage before the current shortages sent the prices into orbit.

In the next post, I'll cover some of my gear and talk a bit about how I approached setting it up.