There’s been a slow change in how I feel about ownership this past year. I’ll chalk this up to age, but there’s probably more external forces at play than I care to admit. It’s been on my mind often lately, so I felt it was time to write down a few thoughts.

Bookmarking

I’d been bouncing around using several different tools for bookmarking and read later uses. None of which I controlled, all of which had some variant of cloud storage controlled by some unknown developer or company. Everything I tried had some small issue that bothered me enough to keep trying out other options. But I realized the core of my issues were around ownership. I was trusting these services to house my data.

Granted, bookmarks and articles saved for reading later don’t typically amount to anything I’d worry about exposing my interests through some data breach. If someone found out that I’d bookmarked “An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch”, or “The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time ” so be it. For me, this came down more around control. I want to know these things are mine, and for that I need to control where and how it’s all stored.

I ran through various self-hosted options and ended up with Linkding for now. It’s working as well as I need and doesn’t tax my Mac Mini at all. I can also extend its use through the API, which I may do at a later time.

Music

I’ve been using Apple Music for years, and dabbled in Spotify as well. Overall it’s been fine. I enjoy having my music with me wherever I go, and enjoy building playlists from a huge library of content. Spotify has been great to satisfy my electronic music tastes, and Apple Music has an all-around solid music library for my rock, metal, R&B, and alternative tastes.

My primary listening tool is my iPhone. I always have a phone with a lot of storage, in this case 256 GB. This way I can keep music stored locally and not worry about streaming issues. Years ago I had somewhere around 6 GB of music I’d accumulated from CD’s I owned and ripped. When Apple offered their music match service where they upload and match your music so you can have it in the cloud, I happily signed up. But over the years this has become a very sore spot for me.

It’s not uncommon for Apple’s licensing to suddenly end for some music. When that happens, music you have in your library is marked as unavailable. These can open back up as licensing changes, but there’s no indication of when that may happen. Apple also likes to try and fix this by substituting other songs it thinks are a good match. This is worse than just making the songs unavailable. I’ve had songs replaced by weird mix versions and live versions. This really grates.

And so I find myself once again thinking about ownership. I owned this music, as much as anyone can really own anything these days. I took time to curate the music and time to carefully rip the CD’s into a portable format. Now, as I look through the songs I had added to Apple match, a large portion of them are now DRM’d as Apple Music files. I can’t ever take them to listen on some other player, which means I do not own these anymore. I effectively sold them to Apple for free. And in exchange for this “sale” I get to listen to some of them some of the time, all when Apple and the music licensing gods decide.

And so like bookmarks, I’ve begun exploring other options to house my music collection that align with ownership and self curation. I’m currently trying Navidrome, and several iOS app solutions. I’ve spent the better part of two weeks going down a rabbit hole on music library systems and players. That will warrant a separate post here.

Is this weird?

It’s funny when I talk about these things to “normal” people. The idea of ownership seems to have faded away as we all stream content from Big Tech. Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon’s Kindle, the list goes on. We’re renters now, as though the home we purchased silently became a rental and through laziness or a sense of futility we acquiesced. Renting has become the norm, and quite frankly I’m getting tired of it.

In my case, there is also a bit of curation and collecting that drives this desire for ownership. I suspect that most normal people don’t feel a desire to collect music or bookmarks, nor much of anything digital. And that’s ok. I don’t collect model cars, or stamps, but I’d never call these collectors out as weird. There’s pride in ownership, and a sense of purpose in hunting down those coveted items to sit on the mantle.