The big platforms give you a service for every need, but they sit at the centre of what you do. They own the mail, the search, the news, the weather, the maps. You rent each piece and pay with your data and attention. Mu is the same everyday stack — news, mail, search, weather, markets, video, blog, places, reminders, apps — but open source and self-hostable as a single Go binary. A person can run it themselves instead of handing each tool to a landlord.
Self-hosting is real, not a gimmick. You can download the binary, point it at a domain, and have the whole stack on your own machine. The configuration is straightforward, the footprint is small. But it is also optional. Mu works hosted on micro.mu, with the same features and the same privacy, no ads, no tracking, no algorithmic feed, no infinite scroll. You pay for the tools themselves, not with your attention. The AI that assists you is honest when it does not know, and it never replaces your decisions.
Every capability in Mu is a real service with its own API. The MCP endpoint exposes them to other agents, so you can use Mu as a personal backend for your own tools. Mail, WhatsApp, the web — all integrate. The trade-off is that self-hosting requires some technical comfort and ongoing maintenance. The benefit is that you own the data and the infrastructure. Either way, Mu gives you the everyday internet as a tool, not a trap.