Recently I've been playing around with something like this, or really; getting back to something like this. Years ago I was an idealistic graduate student who didn't have any "free" (you-are-the-product) digital service or social media accounts - I used Lavabit (before it got shut down) for email and a couple of cheap VPS providers to run a little blog and IRC bouncer. I had a dumb "burner" phone, a RockBox-based MP3 player, ran Tomato on my router, and ran Debian on most everything else.<p>I think the main factors that killed it for me, that made me drink the Kool-Aid so to speak, were a combination of getting an Android phone and the shutdown of Lavabit (with all the hassle that incurred - notifying dozens of colleagues, mailing lists, etc of the change). Concurrently with this I had just gotten my first industry gig at a pretty large networking equipment company, on a team with mostly older, mellowed, senior engineers for whom programming was "just a job". I didn't want to seem like a "paranoid weirdo" who had some black-hat alter ego. I sold out.<p>Since, I've pretty much moved wholesale to Google. I still don't use any other digital services - Google has basically become my one-stop shop, for better or worse. I use Android, Chrome, Gmail, Drive, Music, Books, Search, Maps, Keep, Photos, basically the whole damn suite. It's a beautifully unified and seamless experience. I feel in-general, Google gets just about everything right (I don't use Docs - I still write docs in LaTex, haha). It's quite a 180 from what I had before.<p>But ultimately, I think this has caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to "get back" lately, but this is tempered by how much control I've already given up and, well, what is frankly a pretty damn high quality and convenient experience and there are some things (like Maps, and Photos) which I really don't want to give up. I also don't hold any delusions that anything I do is going to be "more secure" from any threat model, really. I guess I just miss all the DIY. The creativity and control.<p>Anyways, recently I've been building an ARM64-based "mini-homelab" around an Archer AC1750 router running OpenWRT, a stack of three Odroid C2 SBCs, and an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (with a 50K LUT FPGA on the m.2 PCIe slot). I also have an ARM64 VM in the cloud. Once that's all set up, I've been considering how much I can "get back" under my control.