I have been thinking a lot about digital sovereignty lately and how quickly the internet is turning into a weird blend of surreal slop and centralized control. It feels like we are losing the ability to tell what is real because of how easy it is for trillionaire tech companies to flood our feeds with whatever they want.

Specifically I am curious about what I call “kirkification” which is the way these tools make it trivial to warp a person’s digital identity into a caricature. It starts with a joke or a face swap but it ends with people losing control over how they are perceived online.

If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?

I want to know if anyone here has tried moving away from the cloud toward sovereign compute. Is hosting our own communication and media solutions actually a viable way to starve these massive models of our data? Can a small town actually manage its own digital utility instead of just being a data farm for big tech?

Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?

It seems like we should be aiming for a world of a million millionaires rather than just a room full of trillionaires but the technical hurdles like isp throttling and protocol issues make that bridge hard to build.

Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai? I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity and keep our data grounded in meatspace.

    • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Wait how did you set it up to avoid haloucinations? Is there a guide you followed that you can point me to?

        • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Thats awesome! I was going to add some sort of AI to my proxmox homelab for researching but I figured the risk of halloucination was too high, and I thought that the only way to fix this was getting a bigger model. But thid seams like a really good setup (if I can actually figure out how to implement it.) And I wont need to upgrade my gpu!

          Althogh I only have one ai suitable gpu (I have a gtx 1660 6gb in my homelab which is really only suitable for movie transcoding.) I have a 3060 12gb that I use in my gaming pc I was thinking I could setup some kind of wol system that boots the pc and sets up the ai software on that. Maybe my homelab hosts openwebui and when I send a queory it prompts my gaming pc to wake up and do the ai crunching.

            • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
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              4 months ago

              I have a 12 gig gpu that I dont use for most of the time, might as well put it to work doing something. And even second hand ddr4 memory has gotten so expensive I’d rather not have to upgrade my homelab.

              What is your main use case for this anyway? Do you use it for researching? Thats what I would mainly use it for, but also finding things in my obsidian volt.

              What stage have you actually gotten to?

              I do like the idea of this all though. I should really get into undervolting/overclocking my stuff, there is really no reason not to I could either gain performance or longevity or both!

              Also I hate that the stock fans on cpu’s are so garbage. Luckily arctic fans are really cheap and quiet. Noctua is great but i’d sooner buy a budget aio than a single noctua fan lol.

                • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
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                  4 months ago

                  Oh I didn’t realise you were going to release it! I was just going to try and setup a simplified version myself, that’s really cool. Don’t worry I’m patient and I will be too busy this year to implement anything for myself anyway, but I too (with my likely getting diagnosed soon adhd brain) share your enthusiasm for a way to implement an AI that collects information for you without lying.

    • jtzl@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      Possibly a dumb question, so I tentatively pre-apologize: is LXC “Linux Container?”

    • Dr_Vindaloo@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Is there somewhere I can follow to see this if you end up open sourcing it? Sounds pretty interesting (personally I’m looking into a k3s-based setup but it’s always interesting to see how others do things)

  • Cherry@piefed.socialEnglish
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    4 months ago

    This is not an answer but more something I have been considering lately. I am starting my self hosting adventure.

    A aspect which pi$$es me of is the ring cameras. They have gone from a comfort buy that halos you identify who is at the door to a neighbourhood surveillance network. Even paid for by the people. And it’s starting used against individuals and communities.

    I have never had one. I begrudge my face being on them as I pass my neighbour’s homes. I did not ask for it.

    I would like some cameras to protect my property but at what cost? And here’s where the self hosting comes in, is it possible to set up something that gives me what I want but not have to sacrifice mine or my neighbours privacy. It probs costs a bit more. It takes a bit more effort. On the other hand most people just run to Amazon click buy now. I feel like I am loosing against tide of yeh bu ma parcels.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Sure, rent a cloud server for $10/month, install Docker/Podman then all self hosted services you need. Invite people on your Jitsi Meet server, publish your videos on PeerTube, work via NextCloud, etc. It’s not easy the first time but with each (well documented) step it becomes easier. Most important : backup your data.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        That’s actually my recommendation yes.

        If somehow after a month you feel like you do want this “lifestyle”, are comfortable with setting up a VPN (if you need external access) THEN spend more and get your a SBI like a RPi and have it at home. If that’s still not enough then go up to a proper server you host, use a non commercial ISP, etc … but IMHO don’t start with a server at home if you are not familiar with all this, it’s counter intuitively harder and definitely more expensive.

        Also FWIW you should still have an offsite backup regardless of how you do it.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            IMHO the key aspect isn’t where you host things but rather understanding how hosting itself works.

            To me the most challenging aspects are how to :

            • route traffic
            • start a service
            • backup your data

            and also ideally

            • have more than 1 service on a single machine
            • restore your data
            • restore your entire setup

            For that very first step I would say having a machine directly exposed to the Internet makes it easier. I don’t know what ISP you use but at least in Belgium where I’m currently located all ports are closed and IP are dynamic. That means if you want to show your freshly started Apache Web server to your mother in law it will challenging.

            Meanwhile if you do manage to get to the last step, namely restore your entire setup, then restoring to a cloud service or a RPi is the same, you transfer your data, start your services and voila, you are back either LAN only or on the entire Internet via a cloud provider.

            So autonomy isn’t as much as to where things are physically hosted and by whom as in the actual capacity to able to host there or elsewhere.

            Finally if you are using a commercial ISP, as opposed to having your own AS, are you really self-hosting?