Digital Homesteading: Reclaiming the Land We Gave to Big Tech
Why the modern internet feels rented — and how local hosting, open source, and small networks can make us owners again.
The Eviction Notice
There's a particular helplessness that comes from losing access to a decade of your own words. Maybe it's a suspended account, a changed terms of service, or a platform that simply decides your content violates guidelines you never knew existed. One moment, you're a digital citizen in good standing. The next, you're locked out of your own history.
This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed.
We've spent the past two decades handing over our digital lives to landlords who promised convenience in exchange for control. We compose our thoughts in their text boxes, store our memories on their servers, and build our communities in their walled gardens. And like any tenant, we've learned a fundamental truth: no matter how long you've lived there, it's never really yours.
The modern internet feels rented because it is rented. But it wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.
The Original Homesteaders
In the early days of the web, you didn't rent your presence online—you built it. People bought domain names, learned basic HTML, and carved out their own corners of the internet. These weren't polished corporate experiences. They were digital homesteads: rough-hewn, deeply personal, and wholly owned.
A personal website circa 1997 might have been aesthetically questionable, but it represented something profound: digital sovereignty. Your words lived on a server you controlled (or at least understood). Your design choices were yours alone. If you wanted to reorganize everything at 2 AM or fill your site with animated GIFs of dancing hamsters, nobody could stop you. More importantly, nobody could delete you.
This wasn't just technical architecture—it was social architecture. The early web was a federation of independent homesteads connected by hyperlinks. You discovered new sites through webrings and blogrolls, not algorithmic recommendations. Communities formed around shared interests, not engagement metrics. The internet felt vast and weird and genuinely decentralized because it actually was.
Then we traded it all for convenience.
The Sharecropper's Bargain
The platforms that came to dominate the web made us an offer we found hard to refuse: give us your content, your attention, and your data, and we'll handle all the complicated bits. No need to learn web hosting or worry about server maintenance. Just sign up, start posting, and watch the likes roll in.
It seemed like a fair trade at the time. Building and maintaining a personal website required technical knowledge most people didn't have. Platforms democratized online publishing, letting anyone with an internet connection share their thoughts with the world. They connected us to audiences far larger than any individual blog could reach. They were free, they were easy, and they worked.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped being homesteaders and became sharecroppers.
Sharecropping, for those unfamiliar with the historical parallel, was a system where farmers worked land they didn't own, giving a portion of their harvest to the landowner in exchange for the right to farm. In theory, it was mutually beneficial. In practice, it kept farmers perpetually dependent, with no path to ownership and no security against the landowner's whims.
The digital version looks remarkably similar. We produce content—the harvest of our creativity, knowledge, and social connections—on platforms we don't control. The platform owners monetize our contributions through advertising and data extraction while we receive... what, exactly? Visibility, perhaps. Social validation. The dopamine hit of notifications. But never ownership, and never security.
The terms of service we agreed to without reading make this explicit. Our content can be used for AI training. Our accounts can be suspended for violations of ever-changing community guidelines. Our data can be sold to advertisers, shared with law enforcement, or subpoenaed by governments. The platforms can be sold to billionaires with axes to grind or shut down entirely when they stop being profitable.
We're not users of these platforms. We're the livestock.
The Costs of Convenience
The consolidation of the internet into a handful of platforms hasn't just created dependency—it's fundamentally reshaped what's possible online.
Consider algorithmic curation. When you controlled your own website and chose which other sites to link to, you were making editorial decisions about what you wanted to amplify and share. When an algorithm makes those decisions for you based on engagement metrics, it's optimizing for a very different goal: keeping you scrolling. The result is a informational diet engineered not for nutrition but for addiction.
Or consider the homogenization of online spaces. Every platform converges toward the same features: infinite scroll, reaction buttons, stories that disappear, recommendation engines. Your Instagram looks like your Twitter, which looks like your Facebook, which looks like your TikTok. The unique cultures that once flourished on different corners of the web have been flattened into a monoculture of engagement optimization.
There's an economic dimension too. When a handful of platforms control the primary means of online communication and community-building, they function as digital infrastructure—except unlike roads or utilities, they're privately owned and optimized for profit extraction. Small businesses pay Facebook for reach they used to have organically. Artists pay Patreon to access their own fans. Writers pay Substack for email infrastructure that's been around since the 1970s.
The platforms have become digital landlords collecting rent on every interaction.
Perhaps most insidiously, platform consolidation has created a learned helplessness about technology itself. An entire generation has grown up believing that using the internet means using apps made by giant corporations. The idea that you could just... make your own website, host your own services, control your own data—it seems as fantastical as building your own car or generating your own electricity.
But it's not fantastical. It's just been made to seem that way.
The New Homesteaders
Across the internet, a quiet rebellion is underway. People are remembering that another way is possible, and they're building it.
They're running Mastodon instances that federate with other instances, creating a social network that's decentralized by design. They're hosting their own Wordpress blogs, not on wordpress.com but on servers they control. They're building personal wikis, digital gardens, and experimental interfaces that would never survive in the homogenized environment of platform capitalism.
They're learning to host their own services: email servers, file storage, photo galleries, RSS readers, password managers. Services that once seemed to require massive corporate infrastructure turn out to work just fine on a Raspberry Pi in someone's closet or a $5/month virtual private server.
The tools have never been more accessible. Open source software provides free, often superior alternatives to nearly every proprietary service. No-code and low-code tools let non-programmers build sophisticated websites and applications. Federation protocols like ActivityPub enable small, independently-hosted services to communicate with each other, combining the social benefits of large networks with the autonomy of individual hosting.
This isn't just nostalgia for the old web—it's something new built on old principles. Modern digital homesteading combines the sovereignty of early internet culture with contemporary understanding of privacy, security, accessibility, and user experience. It's the web we could have had if we hadn't taken that wrong turn toward platform consolidation.
The Practical Path Forward
Digital homesteading isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. You don't need to delete all your social media accounts, build your own data center, and go off-grid. The goal isn't purity—it's sovereignty. Even small steps toward owning your digital presence compound over time.
Start with a domain name. It costs about $15 a year and gives you a permanent address on the internet that no platform can take away. You can point it at a simple website, use it for email, or just hold onto it as a stake in digital ground you own.
Control your content. Before posting something significant to a platform, publish it somewhere you control first. A blog, a personal wiki, a simple text file on your own server—anywhere that can't be deleted by a content moderation algorithm or erased when a startup shuts down. Then link to it from platforms if you want the reach, but always keep the canonical version under your control.
Learn one layer deeper. You don't need to become a sysadmin, but understanding one level below what you currently know creates options. If you only know how to use Facebook, learn how websites work. If you know how to use Wordpress.com, learn how to install it yourself. If you can install software, learn basic command line operations. Each layer of knowledge you acquire is a layer of helplessness you shed.
Use open source tools when possible. Open source software can't be discontinued when a startup runs out of funding or sold to the highest bidder. It can be audited for security and privacy issues. Most importantly, it can be hosted and controlled by you. Apps like Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Calibre, and thousands of others provide alternatives to proprietary platforms.
Join small networks. Instead of using Twitter with its 350 million users, join a Mastodon instance with a few thousand people focused on your interests. Instead of storing all your photos on Google Photos, join a Pixelfed instance or run your own. Smaller communities are more manageable, more personal, and less vulnerable to the enshittification that inevitably befalls platforms operating at massive scale.
Support digital infrastructure. If you use an open source project, donate to it. If you're on a community-run instance, contribute to hosting costs. The digital commons doesn't maintain itself, and treating the people who build and maintain these alternatives as if their work should be free is how we ended up dependent on venture capital-funded platforms in the first place.
The learning curve is real. Things will break. You'll spend an afternoon troubleshooting something that "just works" on a platform. But that friction isn't a bug—it's the price of ownership. When you rent, everything is easy until suddenly it isn't, and then you have no recourse. When you own, things require maintenance, but you're never at someone else's mercy.
The Social Dimension
The most common objection to digital homesteading is social: "But that's where everyone is." It's true. Your friends are on Instagram. Your professional network is on LinkedIn. Your family shares updates on Facebook. Leaving platforms means potentially cutting yourself off from communities that matter to you.
This is by design. Platforms create network effects that make leaving feel impossible. Every connection you make on a platform is a thread tying you to that platform. It's social lock-in dressed up as community.
But consider: those relationships aren't actually on the platform. They're between people who happen to use the same app. Every friendship that exists on Facebook could exist through email, phone calls, blogs, or a dozen other means. The platform is just the venue, not the relationship itself.
Digital homesteading doesn't require everyone to leave platforms—it requires enough people to create viable alternatives. When some portion of your network is reachable through open protocols and federated systems, you have options. You can choose to engage with platforms for their reach while maintaining your own presence elsewhere. You're no longer wholly dependent.
There's also something to be said for the quality of community that forms in smaller, more intentional spaces. A Mastodon instance with 500 users who share genuine interests produces more meaningful connections than algorithmically-curated feeds optimized for engagement. Digital homesteading isn't just about control—it's about creating spaces worth being in.
The early adopters of these alternatives are pioneering social infrastructure the same way early web users pioneered technical infrastructure. They're proving that decentralized, user-controlled networks can function. They're developing the culture and norms that will make these spaces sustainable. They're building the exits.
The Political Stakes
This isn't just about personal preference or technical hobbyism. The concentration of online communication in the hands of a few platform owners represents a dangerous centralization of power.
When a handful of companies control the primary means of public discourse, they effectively control the public square. They decide what speech is acceptable, what news gets amplified, what communities can exist. They can and do cooperate with government surveillance. They can and do censor speech that powerful actors find inconvenient. They can and do manipulate public opinion through algorithmic curation.
Even when platforms make decisions we agree with, the existence of that power is concerning. Today's benevolent content moderation policy is tomorrow's tool of authoritarian censorship. The infrastructure we build now will determine what's possible in future, less friendly political environments.
Decentralization is a hedge against authoritarianism. When communication happens through protocols rather than platforms, through federated networks rather than centralized servers, there's no single point of control to capture. A government can shut down a data center or force a company to comply with censorship demands, but they can't easily shut down thousands of independently-operated servers spread across jurisdictions.
This is why authoritarian governments fear encryption and attack decentralized networks. This is why China built its Great Firewall. This is why various governments have proposed "internet kill switches." Centralized systems are much easier to control.
Digital homesteading is, in this sense, a form of political action. Every person who runs their own server, every community that operates its own infrastructure, every project that builds on open protocols—each is a small act of resistance against the concentration of communicative power.
The Hard Questions
Digital homesteading isn't a panacea, and it's important to grapple with its limitations honestly.
It's more work. Running your own services means being responsible for backups, security updates, troubleshooting, and all the other maintenance that platforms handle invisibly. For many people, that trade-off isn't worth it. The convenience of platforms is real, and dismissing it as laziness misunderstands the genuine constraints people face on their time and attention.
It's less accessible. Not everyone has the technical literacy, time, or resources to self-host. Not everyone can afford a domain name and server costs. Not everyone lives somewhere with reliable internet infrastructure. Building an internet that requires technical expertise to participate fully risks recreating existing inequalities in new forms.
It's potentially less secure. Major platforms have security teams, DDoS protection, and infrastructure that's hard for individuals to replicate. A badly-configured personal server can be more vulnerable than a well-maintained platform. Security through obscurity isn't real security.
It can be lonely. Building on the margins means smaller audiences, less reach, and potentially less impact. If your goal is to communicate widely, platforms still offer advantages. The question is whether that reach is worth the loss of control.
These concerns are valid. The answer isn't for everyone to become a sysadmin running their own infrastructure. The answer is a diverse ecosystem with a spectrum of options between "total dependence on platforms" and "complete self-sufficiency."
We need community-run infrastructure supported by shared resources. We need friendly intermediaries who provide hosting and services while respecting user ownership and control. We need open protocols that let independent operators interoperate. We need designs that make self-hosting progressively easier.
Most importantly, we need to reject the false dichotomy between platform convenience and digital sovereignty. With the right tools and the right culture, we can have both.
Reclaiming Digital Ground
The future of the internet isn't predetermined. The current landscape of platform dominance and digital landlordism is a choice we've collectively made, and we can make different choices.
We can choose to own our digital presence rather than rent it. We can choose to support open protocols and federated systems. We can choose to learn one layer deeper into how our tools work. We can choose to build and maintain our own corners of the internet, strange and imperfect as they might be.
This isn't about returning to some imagined past or rejecting all modern conveniences. It's about remembering that technology is a tool we can shape rather than a force we must accept. It's about building an internet that serves human flourishing rather than corporate profit extraction.
The digital commons won't restore itself. The open web won't come back simply because we wish it would. But every person who claims a piece of digital ground, who builds something they control, who connects to networks they govern—each is planting a seed for something better.
The land is still there, beneath the platforms. The protocols still work. The internet is still, at its foundation, a network of networks, not a collection of walled gardens. We gave Big Tech control, but we can take it back.
The digital frontier isn't closed. We just forgot we could still homestead.
The question isn't whether it's possible—it demonstrably is. The question is whether enough of us care enough to do it. Whether we're willing to trade some convenience for sovereignty. Whether we can build alternatives that are sustainable, accessible, and genuinely better.
The platforms would prefer we believe there's no alternative. That this is just how the internet works now. That we're users, not owners, and that's fine.
But anyone who's ever tended their own corner of the internet, however small, knows better. Knows the satisfaction of building something that belongs to you. Knows the dignity of not being at anyone's mercy. Knows that the digital world, like the physical one, is better when more people have a stake in it.
The land we gave to Big Tech was ours to begin with. And it can be ours again.
We just have to remember how to homestead.
