What do we mean by Home Computing?
Home computing is one of the greatest inventions of the late 20th century. Emerging from a time when only large organisations had computing power, ordinary people gained the ability to run computers independently in their own homes, without needing to connect to a machine owned by somebody else.
In the last couple of decades, however, Big Tech has been trying to reverse this, forcing people back to a centralised model with cloud computing, apps that only work when connected to the Internet, and people's personal files held in an online account that can be deactivated at any time by the platform hosting it.
But this isn't a community for complaining about them. This is a community for discussing ways to bring computing back into our homes.
This community isn't against using the Internet entirely, of course. Some uses of the Internet cannot be performed offline, such as sending messages to other people, or running software updates. These are perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is being expected to connect to someone else's server and log into an account for every little computing task.
Good posts
- Asking for recommendations for home computing hardware/software
- Giving recommendations for home computing hardware/software
- Asking for help setting up home computing hardware/software
Bad posts
- Articles and/or rants about the latest example of centralisation committed by big tech (we know big tech sucks, that's why we are here)
Thanks for commenting. I checked my comment, and it seems I did just write "Internet connection" - just a mistake from rewriting the comment and not leaving it in a coherent state. Sorry about that.
I use the Internet daily as well. I'd just like to avoid being locked-in to some remote service.
For someone to participate in this subreddit, they only need to want to rely more on hardware/software that they control instead of those controlled by someone else. As for why they might want this - different people might have different reasons.
A few possible reasons people might be interested:
But the community is open to members regardless of why they are interested.
And they're all perfectly fine reasons, if you ask me. To give you some context, despite living in a big city with a real fast Internet access I worked my ass of in order to optimize my blog so that it loads as fast as possible even on a shitty connection. And will update it every time I find a new way to optimize it a little more. (if you're curious, switching to the AVIF file format for images was the most impactful change, next to using no script at all, it's only static HTML/CSS, obviously reducing the overall size of the pages ;)
I also moved back to reading print books/newspapers out of privacy and ownership concerns.