Homelab Saga Part 1: Why I homelab

I was originally planning to write about my current homelab setup, and my progress and plans for migrating to a kubernetes cluster. But the section on why ballooned out of control. So here it is as a standalone post, and a starting point for the series of posts that will follow on the more technical side of my homelab.

While the internet may feel eternal, its contents are ephemeral. Over the years, much of what I grew up enjoying on the internet has gradually faded out of existence. Companies get acquired or go out of business, creators lose interest or pass away, and fan content is prone to be shutdown by rights holders. Whatever the reason, the things that are meaningful to us won’t always be there if we don’t make efforts to preserve them.

WeGame - The rise and fall

When I was in high school, one of my most visited websites was WeGame. No, not Tencent’s game portal - though that’s mostly what you’ll find if you try to search for it. WeGame launched in 2008¹ as a gaming focused video hosting platform that aimed to compete with Youtube.

At the time if you wanted to record footage of your PC games, options were very limited. There were Fraps, HyperCam, Bandicam, each with their own drawbacks - large file sizes, difficult learning curves, and watermarks. Hypercam’s watermark in particular reached meme status due to its prevelance. Even appearing on Reddit’s original r/place. WeGame aimed to make it simple to share your gameplay with others by providing their own recording software that could upload your gameplay directly to their website.

Every week, WeGame would produce a Weekly Video Review. This would generally involve two guys sitting on a couch, talking about the latest news on the website, and highlighting some of the best videos of that week. In the early days it was hosted by Gorndt and Oxhorn (Machinima creator known for creating ROFLMAO!). After Oxhorn’s departure from the company, he would be replaced by the company’s CEO, Jared.

If at this point you’re questioning what WeGame has to do with “Why I homelab”, you’re not alone. At the time it didn’t occur to me that I should be saving these videos. In 2011, the social media platform Tagged acquired WeGame². The result is that WeGame was shut down, and most of its content lost forever. Including the weekly video reviews.

Insert Koin - Trying to keep a community alive

WeGame had a strong community of which I was an active member. When news came that WeGame would be shutting down, I wanted to preserve that community. So I created a forum called “The WeGame Ruins”, which I later renamed to Insert Koin.

The above screenshot is possible thanks to the Wayback Machine. The forum was decently active for a time. But I was in my last year of high school, had no funding, and little experience with hosting or maintaining a forum. I no longer remember how or why, but eventually I broke the forum and lost all posts. I re-created it, but many users never returned, and it never gained traction again. So just like the Wegame forum before it, it would become lost to time.

During the time Insert Koin was running, myself and some of the community members had started recording an Insert Koin Podcast. We would write up show notes, hop on Mumble, and just chat about various gaming related topics in the news. Then I’d lightly edit it and release it on the forum. We recorded 4 episodes. Like all the written content, that podcast too is lost to time.

The media we’ve lost

It’s hard to list the media that I’ve lost throughout the years. It’s not something I have a running tally of in my head. But periodically something will happen that reminds me of an old video I watched or an old game I played. But when I go to look for it, I can no longer find it. In the 2010s I didn’t think much about it. It’s only now that I’m starting to think back on my teenage years with nostalgia that I’m regretting not doing a better job of preservation. In particular I really wish I had kept the Insert Koin Podcast (even though I’m sure listening to it today would make me cringe).

I don’t know how many WeGame Weekly Video reviews there were. But I’ve only been able to recover a single episode, which had been re-uploaded to and privated on YouTube. There was an animated series I watched called “Worm Wars”, which was left with an indefinite cliffhanger. It was lost media until 3 years ago when someone re-uploaded it to YouTube.

A few other examples off the top of my head:

yfinder.de

I found this blog from the .theprodukkt team website. Wayfinder was one of the devlopers of the incredibly impressive first person shooder in 96kb .kkrieger. Wayfinder’s blog, yfinder.de consisted of pages upon pages of photos of inanimate objects that looked vaguely like faces. Some parts of his blog are still archived on The Wayback Machine. But most of it is no longer accessible.

GameMaker TV, GM King, GM Arcade

GameMaker TV was a series that covered news and projects involving GameMaker. It later merged with GM King, which was a magazine covering similar topics. And GM Arcade was a website that allowed you to upload and play games built with GameMaker. GM Arcade also had an SDK which allowed you to implement account integrations into your game for things like achievements and leaderboards.

I’ve been able to find blog posts about GameMaker TV, but unfortunately it seems the videos are long gone. GM Arcade is available on the Wayback machine, but only text remains. I was able to find the description page for one of the first games I made, which was pretty neat. https://web.archive.org/web/20080803050319/http://gmarcade.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_staticxt&Itemid=31&id=52

Much of the GameMaker Community forum is archived. Maybe I’ll take some time to see if I can find the threads for my other games sometime.

The unknown unknowns

Then there’s all the media that may or may not still exist, but I’ve forgotten about or can’t find it. The internet is vast and filled with noise. Even if something is still out there, it doesn’t mean it can reasonably be found. There are games that I have vague visual memories of, but not enough to even know what search terms to use.

The things that were never on the internet in the first place

So far I’ve only discussed media shared over the internet. But I’ve also lost personal media. Photos, documents, projects. Things that I stored on USB drives, or didn’t backup when I wiped a system.

So why do I homelab?

One year ago, I started my home lab with the purchase of a QNAP TS-464 with 64TB of total storage (48TB usable with one drive of redundancy). The goal was to be certain that I don’t have to delete things anymore, and that I can take backups of things I enjoy. Decades from now I want to be able to look back on a library of things that were important to me.