(**) Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
Mytinydc was born in India, during a 4-year expatriation. Tristan, my friend I met in Pondicherry, wanted to be introduced to Linux system administration. We started this training with virtual machines, which quickly became too virtual for a novice. The use of physical machines was essential. The most affordable were and still are the units of type “Raspberry Pi”. Three minicomputers to start with for which I made a Plexiglass stand.
The purchase of a 3D printer opened up new horizons for me. As the training progressed, I became aware that these computers could be used in everyday life. Their advantages are multiple:
- use little electricity
- require minimal or no cooling in Europe
- have a very small footprint
- do not generate any noise
- have a less complicated start than a PC
- and you will discover many more
You will also discover, as I do, that their computing power allows, in the context of a family or a small business, to support significant costs to provide essential services:
- private messaging
- data storage
We must return to the fundamentals, that is, do what we know how to do. What about what we don’t know how to do? Two solutions: pay or learn, but never use free services. The only real legal protection offered by our company is called a contract, which is directly enforceable in court.
As part of the free services, there is no contract, and we see it every day: massive data leaks, collection and use without consent of your data, abandonment of technology without notice and without alternatives. These free services considerably increase our dependence on companies located on the other side of the world, governed by laws different from ours. These companies are also gradually making us lose knowledge, gradually replacing system administrators, developers, destroying local jobs, creating information monopolies, becoming richer than governments, making us believe that they are the major players in IT evolution while their only goal remains to collect and not to share.
I will not apologize for self-hosting. Self-hosting cannot be improvised. But learning to be self-housed is something anyone can do. Do not hesitate to entrust the most complicated to professionals (who can be found in neighbourhood associations).
As a privacy activist, I am an activist with an organization that provides associative Internet access and explains how the Internet has become a supermarket for “private data”. Everyone is an actor in this wonderful communication network, and therefore responsible for its evolution. **The Internet is a space of freedom, but unfortunately it has become too “centralized”. Read this interesting article
Aware also of the increasing carbon footprint of the digital world, MytinyDC can easily be integrated into a “Green IT “ approach. A use case: training. We do not need powerful machines to explain how to connect computers on a network, especially since there are low-power units that support the operating systems of production machines. The question needs to be asked.
I therefore invite all interested people to join this “Lowtech” project to build differently and together, “our environmentally friendly Hi-tech”.
Ready to go ???
(*) Thank you Raven for the content review:)