An article telling people to self host read only by those who already self host. Okay.

IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.

And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.

At the end of the day, those of us who are technical enough will take the risk and learn, but for vast majority of the people, it is and will continue to remain as a non starter for the foreseeable future.

If you’re not paying for a service, you’re likely being monetized by watching ads or providing personal data to companies that don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.

This is a bit out of date. Nowadays, you pay for the service and are monetized by watching ads and providing personal data to companies that definitely don’t have your best interests at heart.

Someday I hope we have a server technology that’s platform-agnostic and you can just add things like “Minecraft Server” or “Email Server” to a list and it’ll install, configure, and host everything in the list with a sensible default config. I imagine you could make the technology fairly easily, although keeping up with new services, versions, security updates, etc. would be quite the hassle. But that’s what collaboration is for!

I stopped reading after this line.

Raspberry Pi won’t do unfortunately, unless you run up to 4 lightweight containers.

Does the author know how much compute power a Raspberry Pi 5 has? If the software that just hosts personal data can’t run in Raspberry Pi 5, that should be a terrible software. For most people and their families, a RPi5 is enough to host anything that they would ever need.

I’m tired of the argument that the solution to fight tracking/ads/subscription/gafam is self hosting.

It’s a solution for some nice people that have knowledge, time and money for.

But it’s not a solution for everyone.
We need more small nice open source association and company that provide services for people that don’t know the difference between a web search engine and a navigator or just a server and a client. I think that initiatives like “les chatons” in France are amazing for that!!! ( https://www.chatons.org/en )

And just to be clear, I think that self-hosted services are a part of the solution. :)

Thanks to self hosting my wife hates me more than before. Thank you self hosting !