I’ll go first with an example below.
What are y’all opinions as to what to self-host (on a computer, instance, or local computer) vs what is better to pay for through subscription or purchase?
The goal is to increase
- privacy from databrokers, ad brokers, corporate overlords, and from family and friends.
- security from threats below targeted nation state attacks, below zero-day vulns.
Example:
Self-host your calendar, contacts, and tasks Subscribe to email via protonmail to avoid all the issues with self-hosting mail servers
I self-host basically everything I can, aside from email. Self-host Calendar, contacts, streaming, budgeting, documents and storage, passwords, private chat, etc.
Email I’d love to self-host, but consensus seems to be that it’s between moderately difficult to impossible to get outbound deliverability depending on quite a few factors, some of which are out of one’s control.
As for reasons why I self-host, basically everything you’ve listed in your post. I want to be the owner of my data, not some corp making profit by mining it for ad revenue or selling it to data brokers. Also I love digging into the guts of standing up my own services and keeping them maintained, I’ve learned so much over the years from it.
I do as you, and run my own services for everything I use frequently except for email. keeping it all behind a vpn prevents unwanted access. I pay for protonmail but operate my own mail server for internal use. I have machinery to download messages from protonmail upon receipt and make them available to me, and to send through protonmail. so I’m doing both and using protonmail as the interface with outside servers.