Transcription
Your data and your memories should be yours and yours alone. You shouldn't have to sell your digital soul to cloud providers or spend hours building a complex home lab just to store your family photos or watch your movies. A lot of people want to reclaim their data, but they get scared off by complex command lines and the time commitment of managing a home lab.
But I think self-hosting and home labbing are different things. Homelabbing is complex by design. It's a hobby for nerds like me, but self-hosting is a necessary process for reclaiming your data. And so it should be simple and accessible to everyone. And that's where tools like Umbrell OS come in. With the Umbrell OS App Store, I was able to install Jellyfin and Image with like two clicks each. No command line and no Docker Compose.
So, in this video, we're going to look at why escaping the cloud is so hard, how self-hosting differs from home labbing, the essential apps you need to escape the cloud, a full walkthrough of how to install Umbrell OS, and finally, what I think still needs to be built to make self-hosting accessible to everyone. So, let's do this.
The cloud has been the default way to compute for a while now. We don't trust local file storage, and often rightly so. I've seen way too many laptops die sad, pathetic deaths to trust them with my family photos or my taxes. And so, most people use the cloud for everything these days. You want to edit and store your documents? Well, there's Google Drive for that. You want to store your family photos and view it on all of your devices. iCloud has you covered. And why spend the time buying and managing Blu-rays when you could just stream the movie on Netflix?
But more and more people are seeing how their data is being misused. It's being used to build precise profiles of you so that you can be targeted with ads and different services. It's also being mismanaged, which we can see through the myriad of data leaks that happen, I don't know, every couple of months at least. And [snorts] God knows, it's probably being used to train some next generation AI without your consent. And that's kind of the core part here because if you could consent, if you could opt in or opt out, then you'd still have some sense of digital agency of ownership. But you can't. Not really.
Escaping the cloud by going full analog or offline in 2025 just isn't really viable. It doesn't make sense. Like even if you're a physical media movie lover, you know that Blu-ray discs have the potential to rot. And so you probably want some kind of digital backup for all of that media that you love or for your family photos. It's kind of expensive and a rare service these days to be able to print them out. And although that's a beautiful thing to do, you probably still want backups just in case. I mean, these are family photos. And even if you are hardcore enough about your analog life to write out every one of your documents by hand and store them in filing cabinets, eventually you're going to have to collaborate with a colleague on the cloud or send a financial adviser like a PDF of your taxes. You're going to participate in the digital and in the cloud.
So, the question isn't how do we escape the digital, it's how do we maintain control and ownership of our data while still getting to use all of the digital services we use and need in 2025. And this is where a lot of people turn to self-hosting.
To explain self-hosting, first I have to talk a little bit about the cloud. Now, the cloud is really just a bunch of computers managed by IT professionals somewhere else with a software abstraction over top to make it easy to use for you. you're essentially paying to rent hardware that's managed and so you're also paying for the service of these IT professionals handling that for you. So you don't have to worry about how much hard drive space you have or if you need to buy multiple hard drives and put them in a RAID array or anything like that. You just pay for a bigger subscription for more space if you need it. And honestly that's kind of cool that that can be done is amazing. Like it's a technical marvel. fact that you can gain access to computers from across the globe and use them for all sorts of purposes without even really knowing that they're there or how they work. The unfortunate part is that the companies running these cloud services on mass have found a better way of making money. And it's not charging you more for subscriptions. It's selling and buying your data for all sorts of weird nefarious purposes.
So, if that's the cloud, self-hosting is basically buying and managing the computers that run your essential digital services yourself. It's bringing the cloud into your home. By bringing those computers back into your home and managing the services yourself, you have full control over your own data, where it goes, how it's used, all of that. Self-hosting is a reclamation of our digital agency.
Now, at the beginning of this video, I made a fairly contentious claim that home labbing and self-hosting are actually separate things. This is not, I think, the common view, and it makes sense, right? Because home labbing is also the process of taking that cloud compute infrastructure, putting it in your home, and using it to host services and run experiments and play with Linux and tinker and all of that. Where I think self-hosting and home labbing differ is by motivation. When I think about home labbing, I emphasize the last bit of the word, the lab. It's about experimentation and tinkering and exploration and learning. It's a hobby for Linux nerds like me. Self-hosting, on the other hand, is more about the utility. It's about launching and running the digital services you need on your own compute infrastructure. And of course, there's a lot of overlap. I run a home lab that also self-hosts jellyfin, but it's much more oriented towards learning and experimenting with technologies I don't yet know. I could easily self-host a lot more stuff if I were on Docker Compose, but I'm trying out Kubernetes and ZFS and NFS from scratch because I'm interested in learning. It's about the hobby of learning Linux and stuff. But that's what I do with my compute infrastructure.
And here's the thing. I think there's a really quickly growing group of people who maybe don't have a tech background who still want to reclaim their digital privacy and escape cloud services. And shouldn't they be able to do that without having to become a part-time Linux systems administrator or going and getting a Linux certification? Like, isn't digital privacy kind of a right? So, the reason I separate homelabbing and self-hosting, acknowledging that there's tons of overlap, is because homelabing is always going to be complex, that's what makes it fun. Self-hosting, though, should be accessible and simple and easy for anyone. Think about it this way. My mom doesn't want Mark Zuckerberg to have access to all of her tax documents. But that doesn't mean that she's going to come home from a long day of work excited to play around with Nextcloud and the Docker Compose and make sure that her volumes are mounted correctly. That's never going to happen. She still deserves digital privacy though.
So the question for me is how do we serve this group of people who are not as technical but keen about their digital privacy and escaping the cloud. And I think we have to start by asking what services does the cloud provide us? And we've already talked about this to some extent. There are tons of things the cloud can do. But I think if you cover these five, you're going to be getting that like 8020 rule of cloud functionality. And it's something like collaborative document storage and editing like a Google Drive thing, family photo stuff like iCloud. It's streaming movies and TV through Netflix and things like that. It's ebooks through Kindle and Amazon and maybe some smartome stuff. If you managed to cover that, I think you would have the majority of selfhosting services covered.
The great news for self-hosters is that there are a ton of open- source alternatives for every one of those functionalities that we listed of the cloud. Next cloud replaces Google Drive fairly competently. Jellyfin replaces Netflix for streaming. You've got image and photo prism for family photos. You've got Kavata or Calibbra for ebooks. And Home Assistant is incredible. It's the best Home Assistant service I've ever used, including all of the cloud and like polished versions by Apple and Google and all of that. Home Assistant rocks. The problem is that in the Home Lab framework, everybody who wants to run these services is an IT professional or very technically conscious. And so, it's kind of a challenge to get this up and running.
Now, if you're a technical person, then you're thinking to yourself, I just copy and paste some Docker Composes and then I write a little make file that Docker Compose ups all of my stuff. Like, that's not that hard. But you have to remember that installing an operating system and using the command line are barriers that like 90% of people will never cross. What's necessary in my mind to make self-hosting accessible to anyone is simple, easy to use graphical user interfaces that come pre-installed on hardware that you can just buy, kind of like an appliance. And that's where I'm interested in things like Zema OS and for today's video, Umbrell OS, which does have its own hardware, but we're going to walk through the install process together anyways because it's fun. Both Zema OS and Umbrell OS are making massive leaps towards making self-hosting accessible for anyone. And that's why I'm so excited to walk through Umbrella OS today, cuz we're going to install a bunch of services like that. It's kind of amazing. So, let's get started.
For the demo section of this, I'm going to be installing Umbrell. And for that, I'll need one of these little mini PCs. You can get them on Amazon for pretty cheap. And a USB stick to flash and put Umbrell OS onto. If you're interested in Umbro S but don't want to deal with the full installation process, then you can buy one of their Umbrell OS devices, and I'll show you that soon.
This is the Umbrell OS website, and I got to admit, it's pretty slick. You can find it at umbrell.com. They right away start advertising their Umbrell home device, which is 500 Canadian. It's a pretty good mini PC. It comes with an N150 processor, which it's a pretty good little home lab device. It's probably a little overpriced for exactly what hardware you're getting, but the fact that it comes with this really nice, fully open- source self-hosting operating system is pretty great. We're not going to be doing that right now, though. We're going to just go over to Umbro OS, and then we're going to download the operating system. Now, oddly enough, they don't actually have the download on this page, or at least I couldn't find it. Instead, you're going to have to go to their GitHub. So you can click up here and then you can go to releases and down here you can download one of these. I'm going to be using the USB installer ISO and so we'll take it from there.
Now that this is finished downloading, you can see I've got Umbrell OS installer over here. I'm going to take my USB stick and just plug that in. Then there are a lot of ways that you can go about flashing this onto your USB stick. One of the easiest tools for flashing USBs is Bolina Etcher. Uh, you can install that on just about any operating system you're on. I'm currently on Linux, but it's going to work just fine. So you can download. I'm not going to go through how to flash a USB drive. If you're interested in those steps, you can take a look at my Linux Mint video where I walk through this process in a little bit more detail.
Now that our USB stick is flashed with the Umbrells installer, I'm going to plug that into this mini PC and then start installing Umbrell OS. I'll walk you through that whole process. So I'm powering on my mini PC with the USB plugged in. And what's going to happen is we'll get this little screen that asks us if we want to enter the Umbrell OS installer. And I'm going to hit yeah. Yeah, [snorts] I do. Gives you a big scary screen full of Linuxy things. And then it asks you which drive you want to install on. SDA is the internal hard drive for this device. And SDB is the little USB stick that I've got plugged into it. So definitely not SDB. We're going to go with SDA here. And it just goes. It really doesn't ask you very many questions at all. This is one of the most like automatic Linux installs I've ever experienced, which is very on brand. Yeah. So, that's going to go for a while. I'm going to go make some more coffee. My coffee is not even ready yet.
All right, it's telling us to shut down, pull out the USB stick, and then when it boots back up, we'll be in Umbrell OS. Coffee acquired, and Umbrell OS is booted up. So, let's take a look. Little nod to network chuck. So when Umbreal boots up, it gives you this screen and it kind of feels useless. This is not what matters. Umbrel is driven primarily through a web UI. So what actually matters here is that HTTP link at the top. Umbrell.local. That's where we're going to go on any machine on our local network. So I'm going to do it for my Linux box over here. You can see I've still got Bolina etcher open on screen. I'm just going to go umbrell. If only I could type. And it gives us this beautiful little screen. Welcome to Umbrell OS. Your home cloud server is ready to set up. I like the I like the verbiage, you know. So, let's hit start. I'm going to tell it my name is Nathan. I'm going to use my default password for examples. And we're going to create. You're all set. Umbrella is now ready. Like wicked fast. It gives you a bunch of sort of default starter apps. So, it actually kind of starts pushing us in the direction of like, well, what might you want as a self-hoster? Next cloud, image, pi hole, jellyfin if you're looking to stream. This is a great set of defaults. Now, they don't come pre-installed, but I'm going to show you how like wicked easy it is to install things on Umbrell.
So, let's go to explore more in the app store. We're just going to dive right in and we're going to start with Jellyfin. So, I'll click that. I'll click install and that's going to run in the background for evidently not very long. I guess it'll run in the foreground because I didn't have time to background it and explore. That is crazy fast. Now I can click open. Okay, it took a second and I'm going to select the Umbreal server. Okay, so it wasn't perfectly smooth. I had to restart the jellyfin container to get it working. But if I click it now, we go through the regular sort of tutorial onboarding thing. I could add a media library and all of the usual jellyfin kinds of stuff. So, I'm just going to hit finish and log in and show you that more or less this works. There's nothing on here yet, but we have a running Jellyfin server, which is pretty cool. All we had to do was click install and then and then restart it. So, little hiccup, but we're good. That's That's pretty nice.
And if we want to do a little bit more, we can go over here. This is their app store icon. And we can install some other nice tools like Image. Image was our Google Photos replacement or iCloud photos replacement. And it installs very quickly and easily. And it is a beautiful little app, too. While we're at it, I'm just going to install a bunch of these different applications. Basically, all of the ones we talked about if I can find them in the app store. And with a couple of clicks, I have basically all the cloud replacements I was talking about. I've got Book Lore for ebooks. I've got Home Assistant just installing now. I've got image, jellyfin, and nextcloud. We're kind of good to go. I've also got file storage on here. So, you've got a nice little Google Drive kind of replacement. You can upload to it just like you would anything. So, if I go over here and click upload and I throw, I don't know, my thumbnail from a previous video. It's up just like that. Kind of amazing. And I can access this on any computer on my local network. My laptop would access this just fine at umbrell.local. Kind of like you would go to Google Drive.
Anyways, now that all of these have cooked, we can take a quick look at some of them. So, if we look at Booklor, that is nice. I've never actually used Bookore. Create admin account. It creates successfully. Then I can log in like this and I can create libraries of books. This is I've never used this before and I'm really vibing. I like the color palette. It's got Matrix vibes. I can upload my ebooks, ones that I've legally paid for, and I can manage them on like a Coobo because there's integrations between Bookore and Coobo. So, you can use Booklor as your Coobo store. Kind of awesome, no?
Now, we can jump back to our Umbreal dashboard and take a look at image. So, again, we'll do the usual getting started stuff. So, I can go theme. I'm obviously using dark mode. Um, I speak English. I'm going to turn off the map right now because I don't want to get doxed. Uh, and we're just going to go ahead and do all of this. There is also for image a mobile app, so you can install that on your phone and have all of your photos upload to image right away. From here, we can upload photos and all of that fun stuff and we can take a look at them. Image is sort of like a Google Photos clone to the best of its abilities. It comes with some machine learning stuff, too. So, it can start to identify different faces and give you photo albums that are kind of autogenerated. But because it's on your own device, there's none of that creepiness of like Google knowing who all of your best friends are and developing a social network around you without your knowing. There's also some stats and stuff if you're a little bit more technical and want to keep track of your storage or want to make sure that your CPU and memory is like well within normal.
Also, if you're again slightly more technical, you can drop into settings and then if you go to troubleshoot, you can select apps and look at Docker kind of logs. Kind of nice. And you can also look at the umbrellas logs. If you go to advanced settings and click open, you can also gain access to a terminal. So we can either open a terminal within a specific container or we can open a terminal into umbrell. Now umbrell though is kind of it seems to me immutable. Uh, it's based on Debian, but any changes you make to the underlying operating system get overwritten whenever you update. So it's got immutable vibes even if it's not entirely. Um, so it's one of those things where you should probably navigate it and orchestrate it through the user interface instead of through the terminal.
Anyways, I could spend all day poking at Umbrell and trying out all of these self-hosted applications, and I probably will, but for the purposes of this video, I won't. I've shown you that you can install Umbrell OS pretty quickly and easily without a lot of hassle, and the self-hosted apps get up and running like that with that set of applications. and maybe a music one as well. You can replace a ton of your cloud services. I'm thoroughly impressed with both Umbrell OS and the general open-source community for developing such amazing alternatives. If you're interested, I will be deep diving pretty much every single one of these applications at some point, how to configure them, get them up and running on your own home hardware, but those are topics for other videos.
So, I'm really impressed with Umbrell OS, but there are still a few things I think need to happen to make self-hosting truly accessible to the masses. So, Umbrell OS goes a long way toward making installing these Docker applications a lot easier. But there's still two major hurdles for these non-technical users, right? One is going to be knowing which services they can use to replace cloud services. And we covered that to some extent in this video. and two, knowing the correct configurations because getting the files to map correctly or knowing how to do hardware acceleration stuff on JellyFin is a lot of work. A lot of that though, especially if you have preconfigured hardware can be set up automatically. So instead of knowing that you're using Jellyfin at all, there's just like videos. Umbrell.local or instead of knowing you're using image or photoprises. Umbrell.local.
Going a step further, I think we should start using a mental model at least for some cases of self-hosting like cloud in a box as an appliance. Something that you plug into your router and it just goes, right? And you may be thinking to yourself like, okay, but as an appliance, my server could go down and then I don't know how to deal with it. This is all normal for appliances. There are tons of things in our homes that we don't know how they work. I don't know how my washing machine works. I don't know how my dishwasher works. When they break down, I can do one of two things. I can either go through YouTube and try to figure out how to fix it with some tutorials, or I can call up a technician. I can call up a plumber or something. This is not foreign to us. The idea of having things in our home that serve us, but we don't fully understand, and we have solutions for that. I think that might be one possible route for self-hosting as an appliance in the future.
And this all comes back to a thesis I've been developing on this channel. What I'm now calling digital agency as a right. I define digital agency as the ability to choose how your technology affects your life instead of the other way around. It means owning your data and media and also regaining control of your attention by understanding the attention economy and reshaping your digital environment so it serves you. And that's become the sort of thesis of my channel. I've been thinking about how to merge the attention economy stuff and the self-hosting stuff. And I think this is the umbrella, fostering digital agency.
Now, one branch of that is the home labbing with a purpose, what I called it in the attention economy video. This is self-hosting so that you can reclaim ownership of your data and control over your services, right? The entire thesis of this video. The other branch has been escaping the attention economy where apps are built addictive by design and have influence over your behavior. And so what brings these two branches together is how we're reshaping our digital environment so that instead of it influencing us, we use our digital environment to carry out our intentions and live by our values to have greater control over that whole process. That is digital agency and what I'll be talking about on this channel moving forward.
If that sounds important and valuable to you, I would be incredibly grateful if you considered supporting me on Patreon. These videos take a lot of time and energy to create, and I want to keep making them better and better. Your support would go a long way to helping me do that. So, thank you for considering it.
Anyways, that's all for now. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I know how valuable it is. I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.