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:

1. Increasing subscription costs
2. Use your creative work to train their AI algorithms
3. Sell your personal information to data brokers
4. Lock you into their services
5. Increasing data outages and service violations
6. Increasing data breaches to poorly secured systems
7. 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

Neticenters has the goal to grow an economical framework around building, managing, and selling services in local communities. If done correctly, consumers who want cheaper software alternatives that would rather not run their own Neticenters will begin seeing smaller local alternatives to predatory tech. This will be your neighborhood hobbyists and recently laid-off software engineers to start a local Neticenter business in their community. This begins to begins to take the shape of a revival of local computer repair shops some may remember from the 90s.

For this to work, the Neticenter community cannot be solely focused on developing the tech itself, but increasingly move its charter into developing open and free knowledge on how to get started and get involved. This isn't just going to be a simple effort of scraping the internet for how-to blogs and posting every blog verbatim for newcomers to sift through themselves, but intentionally consolidating tutorials, guides, white papers, forums, shared mental models, open design, open books, and the overall language used in the existing communities into easier to digest paths on what roles interest you and how to map your personal skillsets to the roles mentioned above.

The core philosophy is to grow and distribute ownership and responsibility in the community and avoid keeping a few core members responsible for too much and bottle-necking and gate-keeping the contributions of many. This comes with the risk of becoming a messy and chaotic project that is hard to use and navigate over time. Which becomes the primary task of the core team to recognize where work and ownership can be distributed autonomously, which require a vote, and which decisions should be made unilaterally when consistent organization style or other conflicts inevitably occur. This keeps a standard structure to delegating areas of work while not falling away from elegant modes of information discovery within the community. This is what will be required to take the complicated affair of hosting your own services on datacenters a navigable journey facilitated by many hands.

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.

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1. Homelab communities: r/homelab, r/minilab, r/selfhosted, r/HomeServer, openminilabs, mini-rack, and r/HomeNetworking! Learn more about homelabs. ↩︎