What do we mean by Home Computing?

Home computing is one of the greatest inventions of the late 20th century. Emerging from a time when only large organisations had computing power, ordinary people gained the ability to run computers independently in their own homes, without needing to connect to a machine owned by somebody else.

In the last couple of decades, however, Big Tech has been trying to reverse this, forcing people back to a centralised model with cloud computing, apps that only work when connected to the Internet, and people's personal files held in an online account that can be deactivated at any time by the platform hosting it.

But this isn't a community for complaining about them. This is a community for discussing ways to bring computing back into our homes.

This community isn't against using the Internet entirely, of course. Some uses of the Internet cannot be performed offline, such as sending messages to other people, or running software updates. These are perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is being expected to connect to someone else's server and log into an account for every little computing task.

Good posts

  • Asking for recommendations for home computing hardware/software
  • Giving recommendations for home computing hardware/software
  • Asking for help setting up home computing hardware/software

Bad posts

  • Articles and/or rants about the latest example of centralisation committed by big tech (we know big tech sucks, that's why we are here)
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[–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago

I think you're describing ways to find good online services and avoid shady online services. It's a separate topic from what I was talking about, which is retaining control over your own computing by avoiding unnecessary dependency on a company after you've already received the product. For example, an app that does its processing and data storage on a remote server, when it's perfectly possible to build an app that could handle it all locally.

For the example of paid subscription, a good example of what I'm advising against is those new cars that require you to subscribe just to use some of the features of the car that you've already bought. And they can disable them if you stop paying.

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