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.
[deleted by user]
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)
[deleted by user]
Take it one step further and host your repo somewhere other than github. Codeberg, perhaps?
[deleted by user]
Wait how did you set it up to avoid haloucinations? Is there a guide you followed that you can point me to?
[deleted by user]
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.
[deleted by user]
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.
[deleted by user]
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.
[deleted by user]
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.
[deleted by user]
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.
[deleted by user]
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?
[deleted by user]
You can’t turn back the clock. Meaningful changes require a different social relationship between people and production.
deleted by creator
You’re absolutely right about the ageism - that was lazy framing on my part. The vulnerability is psychological and universal, not demographic. I’ve watched my technically-savvy friends fall for the same engagement manipulation as anyone else. I respect the hell out of the radical position you’re taking, and you’re correct that it solves the problem for you personally. But for a lot of us here, the threat model isn’t “can I individually opt out” - it’s “how do I minimize harm while participating in systems I can’t fully escape.” I’m 24, unemployed, job searching in tech. Most employers require LinkedIn, GitHub, email. My actual community - the people I game with, the friends who get me - are scattered across the continent. The meatspace-only option isn’t realistic for someone in my position. Alberta doesn’t exactly have the densest scene for the communities I’m part of. So I’m attempting harm reduction: self-hosted Matrix instead of Discord. Jellyfin instead of Spotify. Soju IRC bouncer instead of Slack. My own Proxmox homelab instead of cloud services. It’s not as pure as full disconnection, but it means I’m not feeding OpenAI’s training datasets or Meta’s engagement algorithms with every interaction. Your point about treating followers as “avatars of the same algorithm” is exactly what I’m trying to escape by moving communication to federated and self-hosted protocols. When I’m on my own IRC server or Matrix instance, I’m talking to people, not to a feed curated by an engagement-maximizing black box. The municipal infrastructure angle matters because it scales the individual solution. I worked at a municipal fiber network - we have the infrastructure to host community services. If a small municipality can run Mastodon, Matrix, and Nextcloud for residents, that’s hundreds of people removed from surveillance capitalism. It’s not everyone going full hermit, it’s building parallel infrastructure that respects privacy by default. Your cross-referencing and source verification advice is solid, but it requires people to first recognize they’re in an algorithmic environment. That’s why I think local-first infrastructure matters - it makes the choice explicit rather than defaulted. I hear you on offline community being the real answer. But for those of us who can’t or won’t fully disconnect, reducing the attack surface and building privacy-respecting alternatives feels like the next best thing.
It’s the way forward, and a somewhat comfortable one at that for people who would rather start a homelab than talking to random humans (including myself). Internet is bound to be corrupt because of it’s inherent lawlessness and political power through mass propaganda. I would advocate for a ban of centralised social media, but that would only be a temporary solution since bots and trolls creep everywhere and communities online might still have a hard time surviving.
But to fight against the shit flooding, it’s hard to see how you’d do without meatspace option and evidently (as dumb as it may sound) you might want to get involved actively into associations or political activities around you. The high individuality (by that I meant the social atomisation) of the US is why it’s been so susceptible to false information and the far right online propaganda. Real life social fabric is what makes resilience against trolls and AI, and ultimately you’ll only be able to fight the root cause when you’ll be free of that dictator of yours.
So I am with you, and it’s hard to see at first but you’re not alone thinking like you do and finding groups around where you live to talk and think together is the best thing that can be recommended to anyone.
Teaching like another comment says would be such an option to consider.
Where is this IA slop people are talking about? I see this rarely. Do you see it in private chats forwarded by friends? tell them to stop it. It’s also on X and Instagram isn’t it? which is rarely browse. Sometime I see it in the popular post of Reddit l, when I’m bored and look there with redlib. I search with Kagi or Whoogle and spend time in the fediverse, hackernews and some of my favourite websites directly. I’m probably in my bubble with less AI slop, maybe I also can’t recognize it anymore. I also hate it and we should have platform/server/community/… rules that forbid it.
You’re right - you’ve successfully built an infrastructure that keeps you outside the slop machine. Kagi, Whoogle, fediverse, HackerNews - that’s strategic refusal working as intended. The slop is concentrated on mainstream platforms where people haven’t opted out. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube - my friends still using those are drowning in AI-generated engagement bait, fake historical photos, GPT-written content. It’s not subtle anymore for people still plugged in. The kirkification angle is trickier though - it’s not just what you see, it’s how you’re represented in spaces you’re not in. Someone can generate deepfakes of you and you’d never know. Your digital body gets remixed without consent. Your “maybe I can’t recognize it anymore” point is real. The aesthetic tells are getting harder to spot. Five years ago it was obvious, now it takes active effort. Platform rules banning it would help but verification at scale is nearly impossible. The only reliable defense is what you’re doing - removing yourself from spaces where slop is profitable. But that’s also a technical barrier. I can set up Whoogle and fediverse accounts, but my friends on Instagram? That’s where their community actually is. Opting out means losing access for most people. This is why municipal-scale infrastructure matters - if a town runs its own services, suddenly opting out isn’t a technical hurdle, it’s just where the community is. You asking “where is the slop?” while others drown in it proves we’re already living in parallel internets. The bifurcation is real.
what does kirkfication means? I really liked your text but idk what it is
