Good Morning Friends! This post will go in some directions… so fair warning it might be a weird ride. The abandoning of Twitter and adopting Mastodon/Fediverse as my primal social network has triggered many changes in how I look at the services I use. Essentially I’ve come to realize that I had become solely dependent upon the corporatized internet for my day-to-day functions. This was a weird realization given that I come from the very early days of the web, an era when I very clearly had to host anything that I wanted to use and pretty regularly became that guy that hosted a forum or a website for every friend that needed one. For years I had an entire infrastructure running out of my house that I maintained. However, the migration to Cable for internet access brought with it a loss of the ability to actually use any standard ports for anything… so I started leaning more and more heavily on hosted or corporate services.
Essentially I’ve been on this journey of evaluating the things that I use on a day-to-day basis. Some of these things are attached to my workplace, and I have no direct control over them. Other things however I use on a personal level… and I could migrate to something that I had more direct control over. I’ve started making subtle shifts, most recently I stopped using Google as a search engine entirely and made the move so many have over to the less invasive DuckDuckGo. A few years ago I made a similar migration away from Chrome as my primary browser (though I still have to use it for work purposes) and moved everything over to Firefox on both desktop and mobile. When I needed to rebuild the second machine that I use for various sundry purposes, I did so as a Linux Desktop instead of building yet another Windows machine. I am still uncertain if I can really move my primary machine away from Windows, but so far the Linux Desktop experience has been pretty freaking solid.
One of the services that I have targeted recently is the music streaming service that I use. Honestly, I migrated to Tidal out of spite a couple of years ago when Spotify doubled down on supporting Joe Rogan. I loved using Spotify… it was a universally enjoyable experience. Tidal… while technically higher quality just sucks as a user experience and the discovery engine is tuned for someone who is very much “not me”. So after leaving Spotify… it became very easy for me to consider moving away from Tidal because my buy-in was not nearly as solid. Essentially I am looking to move away from corporate streaming audio entirely. For years I maintained my own library of music, and then with the release of Google Music I just sort of decided it was not worth the hassle. I got lazy and it became too easy to pay a single fee and get access to whatever I wanted. Google killed its music offering by turning to YouTube Music… which led me to migrate to Amazon for a while, before finally landing on Spotify. Each step… I felt like I actually listened to music less often… that is until I started my Mixtape Mondays nonsense a few years back.
We are going to jump around a bit and talk about Plex. Effectively Plex is a self-hosted home media streaming solution, and I’ve been using this for well over a decade now as a way of watching any sort of movie or television series. Before the existence of Plex, I used Windows Media Center to fill the same role on my network and used an Xbox 360 as a streaming client. Essentially I hate the tedium of dealing with physical media. Growing up I loved the Nintendo Entertainment System kiosk that allowed you to play one of many different games with the push of a button, and that led me mentally down the path of wanting to jukebox-ize all of my media. It was because of this that I became an early adopter of digital distribution first with Direct2Drive and later Steam… and of course, I used to rip every single CD and DVD that I got access to. For MP3s I had one of those early Creative Nomad players as my primary consumption means, and for Video, I eventually landed on Plex and what is now 12 TB of shared storage that has upgraded like a hermit crab over the years as I have needed more space.
I have no clue WHY it took me this long… but I had this mental separation between video solutions and audio solutions… when in truth Plex is not just a great video streaming option. Earlier this year I started a project that I have dubbed “Fauxtify” where I am collecting all of my audio in one coherent library and trying to wean myself off of streaming audio as I acquire things I was missing from my collection. This has honestly been really fun as I have started scouring the local thrift stores looking for bits of music that I remember fondly over the years and then ripping it to my local server when I get home. I still hate the storage of physical media, and eventually, I will have to come up with a better solution to that than just cramming it in the closet in my office.
I think what I love so much about Plex as a solution is that with a premium account, I have access to all of my media through their mobile and web apps regardless of where I am currently. The server sitting on my network effectively brokers a secure connection between the mobile device and my server without directly opening up a port on my firewall. Which has led me down a path of pining for more solutions that worked like this. What I really need now is Office 365/Google Apps… but in the Plex model where I can host a local instance of it but access it remotely through apps that broker a connection back home.
All web searches seem to point me toward NextCloud… but it seems to be more of a true self-hosted system where you need to run it over standard ports and expose them through traditional means to the internet. That is not exactly what I want, but I have contemplated setting this up and running it internally just for document storage purposes. This is where I open up a request to my readers. I know many of you also have a penchant for doing dumb things with technology. Is there a solution I am overlooking? What I really want is something that works somewhat like Plex, but for “office” functionality. I could in theory just put NextCloud on the web host that I keep the rest of my public-facing infrastructure on and that may be the road I go down next. At least there I would still have control over it, but I would rather honestly have something on my local network that gets accessed brokered to it from a more hybrid cloud model.
I guess the takeaway is… Mastodon changed how I view my complacency with using the corporatized internet. Another takeaway is “Fauxtify” is working beautifully, and once I flex out my library a bit more I will likely be killing access to Tidal entirely. Now to chip away at my reliance on Google apps.
I just lost an an entire comment. A “nonce verification” failed.
As someone who dropped Google search for Duck Duck Go and then came to regret it, I’d just like to say DDG is not very good. I thought it was fine for ages because, obviously, you type in a query and get a page of results. It was only after some time, when I started to realise I wasn’t able to find the information I was looking for and began cross-checking it in Google as well that I realized just how poor the DDG rersults were. It simply doesn’t find a lot of stuff that Google does, although of course if you’re only looking at DDG you’ll never know it.
Then I found out that DDG is really just Microsoft Bing with a different front end, which explained a lot. I mean, would you choose Bing over… well, prett ymuch any search engine? I use Google again now.