I wish the internet operated on a different architecture -- something where we all had our own servers and full control over our content
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I believe it's possible to run your own email server, but not your own Gmail (etc) server, as those are proprietary services owned by private companies.
LJ is open source, and it's only one of many available blogging platforms. Gmail isn't, but there are plenty of alternative mail servers and webmail interfaces you can use. MS Outlook even has a web interface. You can set up your own personal web site with all your interests instead of Facebook, and even set up an OpenID server so you can use your own identity on other people's blogs and discussion groups. (As long as they recognize OpenID. LJ does, for instance.) For chat there's Jabber, an open protocol that Google already uses for Google chat.
So it's entirely possible, you just don't get to enjoy the economies of scale and the specialization that comes from aggregation.
Your data would still have some level of risk in transit. It will still be passed around the Internet by servers you have to trust. The risk is lower than leaving your data on some company's server, but it's still there.
The alternative is to encrypt everything for transit. That is easy for a lot of web traffic and possible for e-mail, but 99.99% don't encrypt their e-mail. The furthest that paranoid security gurus go is to guarantee the authenticity of their e-mails (i.e. it came from them and the text wasn't altered).
Another drawback is that your machine would have to be on-line and connected all the time so that your server could run. This is bad practice for avoiding infections on your home computer. You should shut it down (or stand-by mode) when you're not using it.
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LJ is open source, and it's only one of many available blogging platforms. Gmail isn't, but there are plenty of alternative mail servers and webmail interfaces you can use. MS Outlook even has a web interface. You can set up your own personal web site with all your interests instead of Facebook, and even set up an OpenID server so you can use your own identity on other people's blogs and discussion groups. (As long as they recognize OpenID. LJ does, for instance.) For chat there's Jabber, an open protocol that Google already uses for Google chat.
So it's entirely possible, you just don't get to enjoy the economies of scale and the specialization that comes from aggregation.
Reply
The alternative is to encrypt everything for transit. That is easy for a lot of web traffic and possible for e-mail, but 99.99% don't encrypt their e-mail. The furthest that paranoid security gurus go is to guarantee the authenticity of their e-mails (i.e. it came from them and the text wasn't altered).
Another drawback is that your machine would have to be on-line and connected all the time so that your server could run. This is bad practice for avoiding infections on your home computer. You should shut it down (or stand-by mode) when you're not using it.
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