Owning my digital infrastructure

State of the note

I wrote down a bunch of thoughts on Thursday Jul 23 2026, and haven’t really edited them. Since this is somewhat of a “reference”, it would be nice to make it easier to jump to sections/see a table of contents.

Accuracy

This is fully accurate as of Thursday Jul 23 2026. I probably won’t be good at keeping this fully up-to-date, so feel free to reach out if you want to know what I’m currently using.

I’ve been on a journey lately of moving as much of my digital infrastructure into something I control directly. Concretely, this mostly looks like “de-googling” myself.

I am sometimes asked what I use instead, and figured I would document this publicly.

Goals and non-goals

I want:

• technical control over my data
• as far as others interact with these systems, for it to be easy for non-technical users

I am actively avoiding:

• lock-in to specific closed software
  • I really don’t want any of my digital life to suddenly become unusable because a company is trying to save itself from financial ruin.

I am neutral about:

• paying for software
  • most of this is so cheap / free anyways (I try to keep in mind that I will pay $12 for a lunch out and get “less” out of that than a service I use ~daily)
  • we probably should be paying more for the labor of the many that goes into this.
  • … and I also am fairly money-constrained these days, and so price does come in as a tie-breaker
• long or difficult setups as the admin
  • I was a software engineer and taught computer systems. I am comfortable jumping into a large project’s codebase and figuring out what’s happening. I am not particularly optimizing for “this is easy to setup” (I do care about “easy to use on an ongoing basis” though)

However, I have allowed myself to use some commercial solutions that do have access to my personal data.

• I sometimes need something now and have plans to replace it with something else later. For example, I use Tailscale as a VPN, which is built over the open-source Wireguard. I, at some point, will switch that over, and in the meantime accept the tradeoff. Similar for web-hosting: currently run on someone else’s computer (Cloudflare), but I would like to move that more in-house.
• Some things are just very hard to do right on my own. Backup filesystems and emails both have a very high cost if I do it wrong, and I have chosen to, at least partially, pay for experts to do their thing.

Photos

I use Immich. It has an impressive feature base, I was particularly happy to see (local) facial recognition, and a map-based browsing systems, two features I used a lot with Google Photos.

Setup was pretty easy, and the mobile app is good enough that I just disabled the un-uninstallable Google Photos from my phone.

Ongoing work

• I still haven’t fully figured out how to “share” albums.
  • Both in terms of sharing long videos to others, and also having multiple people contribute to a shared event in a seamless way.

Email

I use mailbox.org.

Email is daunting to me, and the failure mode here is having my domain marked as a “spam” domain with no recourse I know of for people to get my emails. I decided it was worth compromising my technical control over this to someone else and mailbox.org won out. (Anecdotally, at least as of January 2026, it seems like FastMail is a very similar service. I chose mailbox.org because it’s slightly cheaper)

Despite letting go of technical control of the actual sending and receiving of email, I cared about:

• bringing my own domain
  • This mean I can switch providers in the future, and not have to tell anyone else “hey, btw, this email no longer works, please use this other email instead”.
• using my own email clients
  • I really, really, don’t want to use someone else’s closed software. This knocks out some popular options such as Proton.
  • This also means that my workflow should stay very similar if I switch email providers
  • I use Thunderbird on mobile, and aerc on desktop.

Together, it means that I should be able to switch away from my current email provider to another, and everyone else’s experience be unaffected, and my experience be unaffected. Hopefully, the biggest difference is to my credit card and who bills it.

Backup

I use Borg, backing up notes and photos on an external hard drive connected to a server in my home, a server I own and control in a different location, and on rsync.net with Borg.

Borg

(under construction…)

rsync.net

The webpage has most of the details I used to make that choice, but in their favor was:

• continuous and legible pricing (200GB min, but then $0.01/GB/month. No extra fees for bandwidth or transfer or “cold storage”)
• zfs filesystem
  • this makes “read-only snapshots” possible at the filesystem level, which helps protect in case of a ransomware-style attack, and
  • ZFS makes that possible with 0 extra storage (ask me why when you see me in-person, it’s very cool!)
• I can do whatever I want with that filesystem (not just borg)
• trust through reddit in the fact they’ve been operating for a long time (25 years!) and don’t seem to be interested in selling out

The data is stored on hardware I do not control,,, which for backups, is actually helpful. Notably, this protects against “someone gains control of my laptop and tries to destroy all I have”, or honestly the more likely “Olivia accidentally sets her digital world on fire”.

Everything is encrypted before I upload it, so rsync.net doesn’t have access to any of my data.

I don’t use (nor do they offer) any “special” features of rsync.net. If you give me another remote filesystem somewhere else, I can use that just as easily, making vendor lock-in a non-issue.

To be written up

• Networking
• Smart home
• Maps
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Music
• Writing
• File synchronization

FAQ

Why are you doing this?

I have already been trying to minimize how much data I put up in commercial companies, especially after Facebook got some negative attention in 2016 or so, and slowly extended it everywhere. Except Google, because GMail is so useful, Google Calendar was how I ran my life, Google Photos was where my memories lived, Google Maps was how I got around, Google Docs was how I collaborated and wrote, and… yeah.

I mostly was like “well, Google is the one company that can know everything about me”, which felt fine until 2025 rolled around, and I actually wanted to make it a lot harder for companies and the government to track me.

Should I also be running my digital infrastructure?

I don’t know: it’s up to you really? As a technical person, I am able to run my digital infrastructure. I already know how a lot of these systems work, having either interacted with them directly, or taught others how they work.

I strongly feel that it should be possible for people to do so. I don’t particularly care to tell you what you should do, it’s up to you. I do hope it gets easier and easier to do so though!