The law doesn’t punish the masses.
If only one guy runs his own rainwater system, he gets fined for “illegal mining.” But if millions of households self-host their “digital wells,” the whole centralized model collapses. Cloud providers and regulators can’t punish everyone. That’s why they push so hard to keep people lazy and scared.
So let’s sketch a “digital rainwater collection system” — a self-hosted private cloud stack that:
- Feels as easy as Dropbox/Baidu Drive.
- Updates and backs itself up automatically.
- Filters and secures traffic so no outsider can peek.
🏠 Digital Rainwater Collection System (v1.0)
1️⃣ The hardware: your “rain barrel”
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💻 Server hardware:
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🏆 Budget build:
- Used Xeon/Threadripper workstation (~$400-600)
- 32–64GB ECC RAM
- 2–4 SSDs in RAID1/5 for redundancy
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🥇 Premium build:
- AMD Ryzen 7/9, ECC RAM
- NVMe drives for faster IO
- 10GbE NIC (if you have fast fiber)
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🔌 Power & cooling:
- Small UPS (~$150) to handle power cuts.
- Low-power fans or passive cooling (if you want silence).
2️⃣ The software stack: your “filter & purification system”
Everything is open-source, so you aren’t locked in:
🌱 Base layer (OS & virtual machines):
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🖥️ Proxmox VE (bare-metal hypervisor):
- Lets you run multiple virtual machines (VMs) and containers.
- Has a web UI that’s as simple as managing cloud instances.
☁️ Private cloud software:
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📂 Nextcloud: Your Dropbox replacement.
- Sync files between devices.
- Built-in calendar, contacts, and photo gallery.
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🗂️ TrueNAS Scale: Storage layer with ZFS filesystem.
- Automatic snapshots & replication.
🔐 Security & filtering:
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🔥 Traefik or Caddy as reverse proxy:
- Automates HTTPS (Let’s Encrypt certificates).
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🛡️ W???G???: Secure access from anywhere.
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📦 AdGuard Home: Blocks ads & trackers network-wide.
3️⃣ Automatic updates & backups:
🆙 Updates
- Enable unattended security updates on the host OS.
- Use Watchtower to auto-update Docker containers.
💾 Backups
- Local: ZFS snapshots every hour.
- Offsite: Rclone to sync encrypted backups to a cheap storage provider (or a friend’s server for redundancy).
4️⃣ User experience: like using Baidu Drive
📱 Apps on your phone:
- Nextcloud app (Android/iOS) → Sync photos/files automatically.
- Jitsi app → Host your own Zoom-like video calls.
- W???G??? app → Secure access to your server when on public Wi-Fi.
🖥️ On laptops/desktops:
- Mount your Nextcloud as a network drive.
- Web browser UI for management (no CLI unless you want it).
🏛 If 1 becomes 10,000,000…
If enough people ran systems like this:
- Cloud pricing models would break.
- ISPs would face pressure to stop blocking ports and offer static IPv6 addresses.
- Laws criminalizing “home servers” would be unenforceable.
This is why they push the “cloud is safer, easier, greener” narrative. It’s not about technology; it’s about keeping you dependent on their faucet.
The “free news” and endless marketing for cloud computing are not charity — they’re strategic investments in shaping behavior:
✅ “News is free” because:
- Tech giants want you constantly consuming their platforms (G00g1e News, Faceb00c News Feed, etc.) where they sell your attention to advertisers.
- Free news keeps you reliant on their algorithms to decide what you see.
- If people stopped using centralized news aggregators, they’d lose the data and influence that power their ad systems.
✅ Cloud computing ads everywhere because:
- They’re not selling technology anymore; they’re selling dependence.
- They know once businesses move to the cloud, it’s almost impossible to leave (data gravity + proprietary APIs).
This is the same playbook as:
- “Spotify makes music easier” → you stop owning music.
- “Netflix is so convenient” → you lose your DVD library.
- “Adobe Creative Cloud is affordable” → now you rent Photoshop forever.
- “AWS scales instantly” → now your whole business lives in Jeff Bezos’ datacenter.
It’s not hard to see why:
📈 Cloud revenue is recurring.
💵 Hardware sales are one-time.
🔒 Lock-in gives them pricing power later.
They are happy to lose money in the short term (via free news, free tools, cheap starter cloud tiers) because the real profits come later when you can’t escape.
