Neticenters
You don't have to be a builder, plumber, or electrician to own a home, why should you have to be a system administrator to own your own your software and data? Neticenters make running software and owning your data like owning any appliance in your home.
What is a Neticenter?
A Neticenter is a set of computer servers that lives in your home, a friend's home, a local business, or an networked combination of these running open software alternatives to big tech internet services. This saves money, supports local economies over billionaires, and gives you back your digital experience and ownership.
Anyone can run free alternative software on their laptop, but Neticenters use open operations software used in the data centers backed by big tech to make sure servers stay up and hardware failures and data corruption doesn't lead to lost data. As opposed to Neticenter's opinionated designs that minimizes the burden of design choices and maintenance while simplifying community support. Rather than the goal of advancing state of the art technology, Neticenters aim to restructure the last two decades of tech innovation that was initially reserved for proprietary tech companies.
Why would I want this?
Neticenter brings back the ownership and focus on local economies of the original web, by hosting free and open source alternatives to big tech software. This project aims to inspire social cohesion through mutual aid in maintaining infrastructure, and reclaiming our friend and information networks. Connecting, sharing information, and trading in local economies brings us closer to the ideal of open markets that haven't traditionally existed since before the dot com bubble. Big tech and other centralized internet services are in the late stages of enshittification and there is a real appetite in society to provide an exit ramp. Enshittification has a real cost, including but not limited to:
- Increasing subscription costs
- Use your creative work to train their AI algorithms
- Sell your personal information to data brokers
- Lock you into their services
- Increasing data outages and service violations
- Increasing data breaches to poorly secured systems
- Act in unethical ways to increase shareholder value
The ways in which big tech has infiltrated our lives often goes beyond consumer pains. It has distorted the ways in which we get information, communicate with and trust others, and in many ways it has become antithetical to democracy.
Neticenters put people at the center
For this reason the name is a portmanteau of Netizen (a portmanteau of "internet citizen") and data center. It's true that running your own small data center isn't easy for most people, but this project is also about intentionally building communities of support, both local and online. It's important to point out that everyone will play a part, and it serves us to understand and make clear different ways you can get involved in the project.
Roles
- Consumers - Everyone who depends on a service provided by a Neticenter.
- Prosumers - Hobbyists, family or community administrators, and small local businesses that build, repair, run, and provide services on Neticenters they own.
- Helpers - Netizens providing community support for maintenance, documenting issues they have, and even sharing free services to the community.
- Leaders - Netizens hosting meetups to grow awareness and get governments and neighbors involved in community projects.
- Developers - Those in the community who create and maintain the open templates, documentation, and provide.
- Netizens - All the above. Consumers, Prosumers, and developers. If you use, sell, share, or develop Neticenter, you are a Netizen in the context of this project. Of course in the broader context if you use the internet at all, you're a netizen.
Goals
Neticenters will be the next iteration of homelabs
Neticenters initially aims to expand upon and improve the experience of communities already running open source software to replace internet services1. With a design that biases towards simplification of ownership and maintenance and makes community support much more feasible, common issues that plague those self-hosting their software, and enable solving other problems.
You don't need to run a Neticenter to use a Neticenter
Consumers who would rather not run their own Neticenters will begin seeing smaller local alternatives from predatory tech, hobbyists and software engineers to start a local Neticenter business in their community, and revive local computer repair shops some may remember from the 90s.
Federation of Neticenters
One such goal is the federation of Neticenters, also known as community clouds, that serve individuals, towns, or municipal level communities or businesses. This requires the strength of communities blended with the interoperability of shared open standards. Federation serves multiple High Availability (HA) design requirements for multiple locations:
- Distributed computing when you go on vacation and want a service running closer to your location.
- Redundancy if your power goes out and want a backup.
- Distributed storage so you don't lose your data if the disk your data exists on fails.
- Off-site Backups when you delete a file, or make a change you didn't want to.
The novelty of Neticenters are their open and interoperable community-driven design, which is composed of open standards, Debian-based custom operating system builds, and a large plethora of templates of how different layers of the data center will be assembled for different system and contexts in which Neticenters will exist.
A History of Homelabs
Initially called home servers, many Linux users amid the late 90s and throughout the 2000s were hosting a Samba server as an open shared file storage and printing alternative to Microsoft Windows Server. The home server trend faded around the 2008 economic recession and as cloud services became cheap alternatives with better redundancy.
Home servers began making a silent comeback in the mid-2010s due to the introduction of cheap single board computers, internet service degradation with inflating costs aka enshittification, and increasingly improving open source alternatives. The trend grew alongside the maker movement and affectionately got the name "home labs" due to its resurgence with the maker trend. The US and EU saw a massive increase of makerspaces during the 2010s2, alongside Learn to Code campaigns, tech layoffs. Despite this, many took the opportunities of the pandemic (r/homelabs had a peak rank of 279th top reddit in Dec 2020) and tech layoffs to start building their own home solutions to host open source. Laid off technical employees are feeling the increasing instability of the tech sector and are picking up homelabs to keep skills sharp and to learn and deploy open source technologies to replace others.
After a few slow years, homelabs exploded in 2020 when the pandemic saw economic uncertainty and a quick shift to working from home and finding new time to tinker all at once. Since almost everything you could do was online, self-hosting was an easy way to lower almost all of your costs.
Services continue to grow more costly, privacy invasive, and are designed as walled gardens which makes leaving a technology ecosystem a high economic, time, and social cost.
This includes many trained software engineers who started self-hosting these systems outside of work and writing about it for fun, but has increasingly grown in diversity in recent years with hobbyist who have no system administration or software engineering backgrounds, but are able to tap into the wisdom of these open source communities.
Market Research Future predicts a "growth from USD 6.81 Billion in 2025 to USD 12.53 Billion by 2034, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate of 7.20% during the forecast period (2025 - 2034)." 3
Another community goal is to do a better job at consolidating the tutorials, mental models, and language in the amazing and existing communities. index those communities, and serve as the most ideal way to get started in this potentially large and complicated space of hosting your own services.