id: fsdi title: First Steps to Digital Independence previous: independence next: wdtg date: 2023-08-28 ---

## First Steps to Digital Independence

It has been in the back of my mind for a while that I would like to have control over my own digital life. I had made this website, keep local backups of my data, but never really went for full independence. Not sure where to start and allowing other things in life to take priority.

Taking the first steps down this road were prompted by listening to Derek Sivers' most recent appearance on Tim Ferriss' podcast. A fantastic conversation overall. The part that stuck out most to me was his quick explanation on what to do to set up a personal server to host things like contacts, calendar, some file storage. I am on Derek's mailing list and just after listening to that got an email that he had written up these instructions for people to follow.

This is fantastic I think, and for a fair portion of the setup it was as simple as following along. For anybody not terribly familiar with any of this I would advise doing exactly as instructed in the post.

I do a lot of my personal programming in Rust. Little tools and things to help with my workflow. I love the language and programs written in it tend to be very fast and lightweight. I knew that I would want to be able to run those on my server so I had to deviate from the instructions.

OpenBSD is a fantastic operating system, however it does not have native support for Rust in the package repository. Also Rust has a new release every 6 weeks and OpenBSD has a very conservative release and update schedule. This results in an extremely stable, reliable, and secure operating system but one that just does not fit my needs.

Considering that I wanted to keep the server resources to a minimum I decided to go with Arch Linux. Arch is very lightweight and comes packaged with a minimum of programs. Kind of have to set it all up yourself. They have one of the best package repositories I have found for any Linux distro that I have used and have great documentation for everything on their wiki.

They have a rolling release, so all packages get updates pretty much as soon as they are out which will be great for keeping everything up to date but the price is paid in stability. I am alright making this tradeoff. I think I can work out and fix any issues that may arise when updating. And it will let me run my own programs/automations that I write without any complicated workarounds.

Some of the packages available on Arch are different than OpenBSD so I had to sort out some replacements.

The differences you can see here.

So far I am using it to run my calendar and contacts, some file backups, a personal git server, and this website. I decided not to host my own email, but am using my own url. I am using Fastmail, but am free to move it anywhere else and still maintain the same email address.

It has not really changed my day to day activities much at all. Currently backups are slightly more complex than uploading something to google drive, but git and everything else are just as easy. And I have the peace of mind that these particular components of my digital life are in my control. I also understand them much better having set them up myself.