Generally laziness helps.

If you host a system, then you have to dedicate resources to maintaining it, which quickly escalates to lack of interest.

If you pay someone to host it, you get to spend your energy on things that you're interested in.

If you can find people to pay you for things that you're interested in, but they just want fixed, you have a business.

So, be conservative in what you host and frivolous in what you outsource.

Note that this says nothing about FOSS. since that's about a related but different concepts.

From a FOSS perspective, be frivolous (as in, do lots) in your bug reports and patches, be conservative in which projects you own.

My rule is that I only do stuff that comes from within me.

Now that doesn't mean that I can't search for that feeling.

I mean sure, if I am on the sofa with a warm blanket posting to Lemmy, I am gonna be anchored there.

What works for me is to work backwards. What do I want? Why? What is needed for that? Why? Just keep breaking it up.

Then I'll do what I call circling, like an eagle. You start with the big circle and slowly shrink it until you get to the core of the matter and finally swoop down and catch your target.

For instance a large circle could be being at your pc drinking a coffee, reading something, taking some short breaks to move and look out the window. This is already closer than say doomscrolling, and in that sense a success.

Now once it feels right, you circle a bit closer. Read or watch something related to the topic you care about. And so on.

The trick is to work with the grain, instead of against the grain, of your brainy bits by balancing boredom against frustration in order to find your flow.

You can stay in any circle as long as you please and it is better to step back into a larger circle than to give up entirely.

While doing this keep visualizing what success looks like. Express this, but also your anxieties and whatever else in a freewriting note (avoid structure).

Most importantly perhaps is to remain skeptical of your desires. The world will always have more work for you to do and will happily keep you busy. And your desires aren't necessarily your friends. Be conscious of the ones you want to commit to. The easiest way to close a task is to simply not do it.

Try hosting a guide on exactly how you did it. There's never enough documentation, and it's interesting to see what kind of workarounds / fixes you might find for any problems you'll have.

Short answer: Therapy!

Long answer:

You've identified a problem that you want to fix (willingness to do effort for yourself versus for others) but you haven't identified the root cause. This is basically one of the situations that therapy is best equipped to help with. It sounds like maybe a self-worth issue but I'm not a therapist so that's about as valuable as a lace umbrella.

You DO need to trick your brain to do this!

Start by saying this is for X and not for me, do the thing, or part of the thing, and build up incrementally.

This is how I went from couch potat to triathlons: I am not exercising, I am just commuting....your brain is dumb and you need to exploit that

Im not sure I would want to change this. Im not sure if its a type of person but im generally more motivated when it comes to others than myself and more willing to sacrifice if it only effects me. I would sorta like the world to work on this principle.

One of these is likely to be true for you. Maybe more than one.

• You don't know what to do, at least some part of it.
• You know what to do, but you don't know what will happen if you do it.
• You know what to do and you know what will happen, but you don't want that to happen.

If any of these resonate with you, then that might give a clue about what to try next.

In addition, you can act without feeling motivated. Some people like starting with 10 minutes of effort or a single step, because sometimes doing anything is enough to sustain energy and focus. It's a way of using inertia to work for you, rather than against you.

look at yourself from the 3rd-person perspective.

treat yourself the way you would treat someone else.

Why not both? Presumably you aren't hosting for others what you wouldn't host for yourself

It will be greatly beneficial for my life and especially my privacy to self-host such software

You should go the Docker route. If you selfhost for yourself you can even use a Raspberry Pi or any common "mini computer" available. Just make sure to install a large enough SSD. 1 terabyte should be fine if you don't want to use OwnCloud or something like this.

(And now you have something to learn! 😀)

Does "for myself" mean "for profit", as in a job, or do you mean community work?

If it's the latter, and you have a passion for hosting instead of developing, that's totally OK.

It's always nice to have some motivation from doing things for others. Depending on the service, you can always host for others AND for yourself. It's 10x as much work but you do get positive feedback (sometimes..)

Maybe find a middle ground, like sharing the hosted service with just one or two persons, like a close friend, family member, etc. Could be someone you live with or that you can give VPN access to your network. That way is more private and mainly for your self, but also has some sense of doing it for others to motivate you.