Introducing Umbrel 0.4 — A Personal Server OS for Everyone
By: Mayank Chhabra
Tags: Personal Server, Web3, Lightning Network, Bitcoin, Decentralized

We’re also happy to announce that over the coming days, Umbrel’s source code will be relicensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0 license, a much more permissive license than our current one.

Licensing is a nuanced subject, so we’ve written a dedicated post that describes this change, its implications, and the evolution of open source licensing. TL;DR — if you don’t intend to sell Umbrel, our new license grants you the same freedoms that come with an open source license.

What’s a personal server?

A server is basically a computer that runs 24x7 to provide services to other computers called “clients”. If you use Gmail, your emails are stored on Google’s servers, and the Gmail app on your phone (or the Gmail website) is the client.

All our interactions on the internet today are mediated by a few companies who offer “free” services in exchange for storing our data on their servers to spy on us. We’re only allowed to do things that their servers will let us do, and we never really have ownership of our data, they do. Hence the quote — “there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer”.

Until now, running a personal server and self-hosting has mostly been popular among computer geeks and nerds, much like personal computing in the 80s, and for pretty much the same reason — a high level of technical skills required combined with the high price of server hardware.

Thanks to the recent advancements in ARM processors and Single-Board Computers, a $55 palm-sized Raspberry Pi 4 today is more than capable to serve as a personal server for an average family — all while consuming electricity that costs about 2 cups of coffee in an entire year.

For the average person looking to break away from big-tech and reclaim their digital sovereignty, the hardware to run a personal server exists today. And now with Umbrel, the software does too.

(Re)building the internet we were promised

Running a personal server inside your home fundamentally changes the entire architecture of the internet today. You, your friends, and your family’s photos, videos, messages, files, notes, passwords — everything, they have nothing to do with someone else’s computer. They’re a part of your private life, and now they can all be stored by you, in your physical custody, on your Umbrel, instead of a random company’s server in Northern Virginia.

In an internet plagued by surveillance capitalism, your Umbrel is your ultimate exit. Grab a Raspberry Pi, toss Umbrel OS on it, connect an external drive, and that’s it — you can now peacefully opt out. You no longer have to stick to their rules, because you no longer play their game.

Because your Umbrel is 24x7 connected to the internet, you can access it, and all the apps on it, from anywhere in the world using a Tor browser, and whatever you do on it can not be monitored by anyone — not Google, not Facebook, not your ISP, and not us.

Every single line of code that runs your Umbrel is public and can be found on our GitHub, and all apps in the Umbrel App Store have their source code public too. So you can literally see everything that happens with your files without taking anyone’s word for it. No more not having a clue about what happens with your data.

Self-hosting apps on your Umbrel fundamentally changes your relationship with the developers of these apps. Because you retain full control over your data, developers can no longer leverage it as a tool to monetize their apps. This better aligns their incentives to build apps that genuinely add value to your life and use direct monetization models, instead of building apps that are optimized to harvest as much of your data as possible.

Bitcoin and Lightning

Bitcoin and Lightning are peer-to-peer networks made up of self-hosted nodes running on servers around the world that are constantly talking to each other, which is why they’re a killer use case for running a personal server.

The ability to independently verify and build the state of the Bitcoin ledger block-by-block, and to participate in the Lightning network without compromises is truly liberating, but it doesn’t end there. Rather, it only marks the beginning of a truly sovereign and user-owned internet.

Currently, Bitcoin Core and LND (Bitcoin and Lightning nodes) are installed by default in Umbrel. Over time, we’ll migrate them to the Umbrel App Store, so your Umbrel would then start from a clean slate and you get to decide what you want to run on it.

This also removes the dependency on us to call the shots on behalf of our users in case of a Bitcoin network fork situation. Bitcoin Core, just like all the other apps, will receive its own updates independently from Umbrel updates. Not only that, but we’ll also encourage multiple Bitcoin and Lightning implementations maintained by different developers in the Umbrel App Store to provide more choices.