I Built a Digital Fortress in the Name of Privacy
The Overview (The Devices & Just a Bit of ‘Why’)
My systems used to be a mess. They still are. Just a little less than before. Here, I will only talk about the main ‘infrastructure’, two levels deep — the devices and the software layer that allowed them talk to each other. Not stuff like PKMs and specific app setups, at least not in detail. So, what follows is a quick tour of my old ‘digital setup’ — circa a year and a half ago.
Every piece of this setup was supposed to make my life more ‘private’. Probably, secure too. Or maybe it just reinforced my identity of a (privacy-focused) nerd — an issue worth looking into in its own right.
I had a desktop min-PC running Linux. An ‘always-in-my-backpack’ 2019 Dell XPS 13. Linux. Another aging Dell (2017 Inspiron). Linux, of course. And a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, mostly for the trackpad and the occasional need to open MS Word. I had an Android phone with a ‘degoogled’ custom ROM. My ‘daily driver’. And I had an iPhone XR and a 2018 iPad Pro 11. The XR was mostly a backup phone, which I hardly used. And the iPad was, well, an iPad. I didn’t use it that much either. It was Apple, and I was trying to avoid the ‘big tech’. At least on the mobile. But also because it didn’t work nice with the rest of my setup. And it’s soon going to be clear why.
What made it bad, though, was that I also wanted to make all my devices talk to each other and get my shit in perfect sync, while avoiding ‘big tech’ and closed source as much as possible. (I kept telling myself that I didn’t use iOS so much for it to collect any meaningful data on my person, and that MacOS, as a desktop system, was mostly fine and not very privacy invasive.)
The Sync Spiral
My cloud solution had to be Nextcloud. I had set it up manually on a VPS. Need to sync contacts and calendars without the ‘big tech’? Nextcloud at your service! Just don’t forget to set up DAVx on the Android! It’s a cinch! Once you have done it once or twice, that is. And then just find a decent open source contacts and calendar apps! Need to sync the rest of your precious crap — like files and photos? Nextcloud at your service! And it works. For the most part. As long as the Nextcloud app doesn’t start acting up too much. And — yeah — don’t keep all your stuff in Nextcloud because space on a VPS tends to run quite expensive.
The Intricate Notes Mess
But then there’s also note-taking, PKM-style or otherwise! Long story short, I ended up with two ‘note taking solutions’. Standard Notes and Obsidian. (These two? Who would have thought, right?) Standard Notes is cross platform and open source. But not very conducive to creating complexity and building PKMs. At least, not in its bare bones configuration. Obsidian is not open source, but very conducive to ‘I-own-all-of-my-notes’ thinking and extremely well-suited for creating complexity. So, gradually — and gladly — I moved most of my notes to Obsidian.
Obsidian. It’s amazing! It lets you spend countless hours tweaking the app itself and/or working on a complex PKM that it allows building (arguably, often without producing any tangible outcome that actually matters). I synced my Obsidian ‘vault’ via SyncThing. And if you know anything about SyncThing, it works. Almost seamlessly. Between computers and Android. And if you manage to install it the right way on your specific Linux distro. And unless you sync multiple folders (which, as a complexity connoisseur, I did). And unless you reset your systems frequently, which, as a Linux-user(-wannabe), I also did. But even all of that aside, there was also iOS. (Because I just had to have all my notes and files on my iPad.) And let’s just say on iOS SyncThing is a major PITA and leave it at that.
The Other Sync Spiral
I also used SyncThing to sync the rest of my crap, like most of my files and photos and music because — remember — keeping stuff in Nextlcoud tends to run expensive. But you can’t just dump everything in one folder and sync it flat between all of your devices, right? Because you don’t need all the gigabytes of photos on your phone. And you don’t need all the gigabytes of music on your Mac. Or you just can’t have all of that there because of the limited space available on these devices. So, you have to create multiple different folders and sync them in different ways between different devices. Complexity much? No, not at all.
The Tasks (Sync) Trap
Task managers. They are amazing! There’s no ‘productivity’ without one. (And the more complex the setup, the more productive you’re going to be!) But there’s a catch. It has to work between Linux, MacOS, Android and iOS. Not challenging enough? Let’s add “it has to be open source”.
So I had ended up using the todo.txt protocol. As a wrapper for the file, I used Sleek on both Linux and Mac and SimpleTask on Android. I synced the todo.txt file through SyncThing or Nextcloud. Again, works fine between computers and Android. If you’re not bothered by the discrepancy of UI/UX between the desktop Sleek and the Android SimpleTask, I guess. And not fazed by the fact that SimpleTask has not been updated in years. iOS? Oh, boy. Who would even want to use todo.txt with iOS? Well, I did. I just had to have it on the iPad. Technically doable, but very clunky. Let’s just leave it at that. Again.
The Password Management Conundrum
Password managers. They are amazing! But you can’t trust one company with all your passwords. Especially if they store all of them in one centralized location. In a cloud. Which they do. Because that’s the freaking point. Because most people need to seamlessly sync their passwords between devices.
Long story short, I had ended up using kdbx database files (plural — because trusting one master password to rule them all would be too easy, right?). And I synced them between devices using — you guessed it — SyncThing. Easy-peasy. If SyncThing works well (see above). Then it’s KeePassXC on computers, KeePassDX (or something similar) on Android and Keepassium (or something like that) on iOS. Easy and seamless? Kida, I guess. Minus the UI/UX discontinuity between the apps on different platforms. Again. And there are no glitches on the SyncThing part. And you are not assuming seamless sync to iOS. And you don’t reset your devices frequently. And you … Well, you get the idea.
The Email (Client) Hydra
Email. Email is amaz … wait? What? Email is email. You gotta have it. Email is a can of worms in its own right. So, let’s keep it short for now and open it later. At different points, I used from three to maybe six or so email providers that I, of course, just need to sync with an email client. I used to prefer it that way. Probably still do. So, it was Apple Mail on Mac with a few stints of (trying to completely replace it with) Thunderbird. Mail on iOS and a constantly reshuffled mix of Thunderbird, Evolution and Geary on Linux. Add to this also add trying to sync contacts and calendars to Thunderbird, both on Linux (because syncing via Gnome Online Accounts was always buggy for me, and don’t even get me started on the Contacts and Calendar apps in Gnome …) and on Mac (because one has to use an open source solution instead of Apple’s native syncing, right?).
The Perfect Digital Fortress?
A perfect setup. Just eliminate Mac and iOS (which was totally doable, I admit), and you’ve got a privacy-conscious dream come true! The system looked secure. And private. It looked smart. It felt like control. So what could go wrong?
Originally published: 1 August, 2025