Landchad
What is a landchad?
In times before the modern Internet, nerds on the Internet had their own land. They ran their own IRC, BBS, and Usenet servers. Back then, those were really powerful systems that ordinary people hosted within their homes to host messages, forums, and files for hundreds of thousands of users around the globe. They were the landchads; aristocrats of the Internet.
The power was within their own hardware and they made their own service. They did not need to pay any Californian company or seek their approval to operate on the Internet. They were the operators; the landchads. In a way, they were the Internet.
The aformentioned systems were used to big effect, before corporations realised they could force their square peg through the round hole that was HTTP, and tap into the market of technically unskilled people. Today, those people only need to open up their web browser to do everything that the nerds needed swathes of software and configuration files for. The landchads of the IRCs and Usenet had their lands dry up as the corporations built dams and irrigated their own land. They were cast aside and many became Internet peasants as a result.
You can be the new generation of landchads. Arguably it is even easier now to set up powerful services than it was to set up an IRC or BBS server back in the day. You can be the landchad who owns his part of the Internet. All you need is one lazy afternoon to spare on tinkering at your computer, and you will have a working website, chat service, and maybe even more.
Getting started
Many services you might want to set up depend on a domain name (e.g.
maxwelljensen.eu), so it is advisable to start with setting up your own domain
name and website. This costs pocket change and can take as little as one
hour to do. Click on the card below to get started.
Building your own platform
Beyond this guide
Of course, we cannot do the world of self-hosting justice with only this one website. The world of free software is a huge one, so it is simply beyond our ability to document all of it here. However, we hope this is a good start for the Internet peasants to get themselves immersed into this world. Here are some further pointers to get yourself properly established as a landchad.
Of greatest interest to you would probably be Awesome-Selfhosted, which is a huge repository of all free software (with some exceptions) for self-hosted services. Anything from wiki engines to password managers, you can host it yourself, and Awesome-Selfhosted lists pretty much all of it.
Maintenace tips
Tips and articles on mastering your server and learning about Linux systems administration. These are the types of skills that will help you with managing not just the services in this landchad guide, but any Linux-based server and any service it might run.