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)
Very interesting community, seems like a worthwhile perspective to approach digital sovereignty from. I feel like ultimately there might be some overlap with the !privacy@lemmy.ml and especially !selfhosted@lemmy.world comms, so I think less reliance on ‘internet’-enabled/hosted software might be a boon to delineate this a little.
Good luck with the comm!
Thanks. Privacy can be one benefit of controlling your own computing. I also aim to promote subject matter that is more accessible to people with less technical expertise, whereas self-hosting seems to involve quite a bit of technical experience.
I created the comm after realising that a lot of the problems that people are raising (very valid) concerns about in recent times (declining quality of platforms, privacy issues, etc) all stem from a root cause, that being the transfer of computing tasks to centralised platforms.