There is a sentence that gets spoken more often than any other this decade, and it sounds like insight but is really capitulation: Well, in the end everything is transparent anyway.
What it refers to is the mood that crept in like damp into a cellar — the assumption that every app phones home, every device emits telemetry, every cloud can read your data regardless, and there is simply no fighting it anymore. Anyone who talks like this thinks of themselves as realistic. Really they have given up and are looking for an elegant formulation for it.
Transparency, here, has become a synonym for resignation. And resignation is a decision, not a fact. That is where this text begins.
The mood no one questions anymore
Let’s talk about the vibe first, because it is real. Anyone who has watched, over the past few years, what used to be a scandal turn into a standard has felt something. Privacy policies no one reads, because they weren’t made to be read. Account linkages you can’t switch off. Phones that know their location even when told not to. Assistants that listen in, models trained on everything you ever typed.
It isn’t paranoia. It’s observation. The infrastructural normal has shifted, towards a state where the individual is no longer asked but merely expected to consent.
What gets lost in this is rarely dramatic. It isn’t the great breach. It’s the slow disappearance of an assumption that used to be self-evident: that my stuff is mine. That a device belongs to me, not the vendor. That a service serves me, not the reverse. That assumption isn’t gone. It has receded into the background, and anyone who says it aloud suddenly sounds old-fashioned.
That is the vibe that has to be named before it can be contradicted. Its diagnosis is accurate — much has become more transparent. It is wrong only in its conclusion.
Transparency is a synonym for surrender
Here is the turning point, and it matters: everything becoming transparent applies only to those who collectively give up.
Not everyone. Not everywhere. Not with equal force. It applies to the mass that decided comfort outweighs hassle, and that the hassle of resisting no longer pays. That is a rational judgment, as long as you recognise it as a judgment. It turns dangerous when you treat it as a law of nature.
The alternative exists. Not as utopia but as practice — in basements, living rooms, small firms, clubs, flat-shares that placed an old machine next to the router and run things there that would otherwise sit with big providers. The scene calls itself homelab, or self-hosting, or simply my stuff. It isn’t nostalgic. It is the most consistent form of what the internet used to be before it ended up in three hands.
And it disproves the thesis of inevitability. Because if there is even one circle of people delivering their own mail, storing their files on their own box, syncing calendars without a corporation reading along, then transparency isn’t a law. Then it’s an offer you can refuse.
Anyone claiming it’s too late anyway is speaking for themselves. Fair enough. They should keep it there and not universalise it.
The convenience you accept
Now it gets concrete, and now I’m talking straight to you, assuming you belong to the sort of people who came to this text because they’re looking for something — not the fastest, not the cheapest, but the right thing.
You probably aren’t among those who pronounce the word convenience with contempt. You’re no ascetic. You accept the comfort trade-off when it’s needed to keep control. You accept that the right, the secure tool may take five minutes longer. That it demands documentation instead of an animation. That it asks for a few decisions a cloud assistant would take off your plate — gladly, and without asking.
This trade-off isn’t sacrifice. It’s preference. Those who enter into it have decided that the question where do my data lie? matters more than how do I get there in three clicks?. That isn’t ideology, it’s a priority list. And it’s more honest than the inverse, where you take the convenience and suppress the consequences.
I’m not addressing a crowd here. I’m addressing a kind of person common enough to speak to and rare enough to be ignored at scale: people who want security for their realm. For the services they run. For the place where their data lives. For the certainty that at night no one reads along except those they invited in.
These people exist. They aren’t the majority. They don’t need to be.
What the right tool is
When I speak of the right tool, I don’t mean the most elegant, the newest, the one with the prettiest landing page. Usually it’s none of those. The right tool has qualities that sound boring and are therefore correct.
It is known. Not famous — known. Enough people have run it long enough that its quirks are documented. Its failures aren’t surprises but chapters in a handbook.
It is auditable. You can look up what it does. Ideally, because the code is open. At minimum, because the behaviour is documented coherently and the community around it names flaws without a press team airbrushing them.
It is low-domination. It doesn’t tie you to a vendor who doubles prices tomorrow or gets acquired next week. It lets you leave, with your data, in formats you understand. Vendor lock-in isn’t an accident of the right tool — it’s its opposite.
It is slow enough to be reliable. Sounds like a joke, but it’s serious. Tools that constantly rebuild their surface, break their API, rotate their features aren’t fast. They’re unstable in disguise. The right tool changes when there’s reason, and explains the reason.
It fits your reality. Not the reality a marketing team invented. Yours. Your team, your budget, your risk appetite, your regulatory frame. The right tool isn’t universally right. It’s right for you.
In practice this looks thoroughly unspectacular: Postfix instead of a hip SaaS mailer. Nextcloud instead of a drive variant that reads along. Keycloak instead of an identity provider that delegates authentication to third parties without letting you see through it. Alpine or Debian instead of a distribution whose release cadence rushes you. None of these tools are exciting. All are mature. All can be explained. And all deliver what cloud promises often only claim.
We haven’t given up
At this point I’ll get personal, and this once it’s allowed.
I’ve run infrastructure for twenty-five years. Started when Linux still needed explaining. Today in environments where banks, telecoms, hospitals and industrial plants run on it. That isn’t romance. It’s profession.
And in all those years I didn’t do one thing: give up. Not out of stubborn principle, but because the question never arose. There was always a way to operate things so they belonged to me and to those I work for. Sometimes uncomfortable. Rarely glamorous. Possible.
We celebrate that. Not as pose but as fact. The capacity to run something yourself is power. Not loud, flashy power — the quiet kind, consisting in being able to, without needing to prove it. Whoever runs their own service, and it runs, holds a sovereignty no subscription buys. Whoever has felt that once gives it up reluctantly.
The homelab community lives this out. Small setups, big setups, chaotic rack cabinets and tidy mini-PCs beside the TV — the form varies, the stance doesn’t. There are people pooling knowledge, sharing configs, helping out in outages, all not because it’s profitable but because it’s possible. That’s the culture I come from, and it’s the culture I want to pass on.
Because here is where the promise enters.
A promise, not a contract
This time it sounds like I want to sell something. True. I want to sell something — but not a product. A promise.
The promise reads: I decide in the interest of your realm, not in the interest of my supply chains.
Concretely: when you come to libcom.de, the brief isn’t to set up something you don’t need. The brief is to choose the right tool — for your services, your data, your risks. And the right tool is sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes it means not walking the popular path. Sometimes it means telling you the solution you imagined is the wrong one, even though it’d stand faster.
That isn’t a service you list on a pricing page. It’s an attitude. And I believe exactly that attitude is missing from a market where convenience has become the default answer to every question.
I don’t promise that everything becomes easy. I promise that it stays steered by you. That at the end you understand what runs and why. That you know the levers and can pull them yourself in an emergency. That there’s no black box only a distant support is allowed to interpret.
It’s a narrow promise. It doesn’t sound revolutionary. But in a landscape where the counter-promise reads give us the data, we’ll handle it, it’s the radical one of the two.
What you get out of it
The benefit isn’t abstract. It shows up in moments that count.
In the moment a cloud provider changes its terms and you notice it concerns you nothing, because your data isn’t there. In the moment a service goes down and you don’t stare at a status dashboard but walk to the machine. In the moment an audit asks where the data sits and you answer without guessing. In the moment an employee leaves and you revoke access locally, not via ticket with a corporation.
And in the quieter moment, when you simply know your setup is yours. That the capacity to run it lies in your house — perhaps supported by someone like me, but not dependent on him. That’s the experience I let you share in. Not secret knowledge, but the stance behind it.
Whoever has lived that once understands why homelabbers do what they do. It isn’t hobby. It’s rehearsal of a freedom-practice that pays off when it counts. And whoever has it accompanied professionally shouldn’t hand it over but learn it.
If this was your text
Then get in touch.
Write to contact@libcom.de. Describe what you run, what bothers you, what you wish for. We won’t turn it into a pitch presentation. We’ll talk about what should run at your place, where it should run, and which tool is the right one — not the trendiest, not the one that pays me most.
This once it’s okay if it sounds like selling. Because what’s sold here isn’t a feature. It’s the assurance that someone stands on your side when it comes to what you run your world on. That’s a narrow offer. It’s enough for a whole realm.
Resignation is a life choice, not a law of nature. Those who decide not to give up join a small, sturdy tradition. I’m glad to be part of it — and glad to stand at your side when you join.