I'm confused because the article talks about self hosting on a VPS and how many self hosted services could stand up to legal action?

That sounds like it's describing running a public service for others. Self-hosting IMO is running something for yourself, it doesn't even need to be on the public internet 99% of the time.

Running a service for others is just plain old hosting.

before I read the article, I wholeheartedly disagree with the title.

Self-Hosting not only brings control back into your own hands, but also hones your skills at the same time.

OK so after reading I do agree partially with the regulation aspect, but from a privacy POV all of that is fixed by just not storing PII, I run multiple services in my stack, and the most info I collect on someone is their email, which they defo could just opt out of which I would delete off the system.

As for the cost and labor. It's really not that difficult, my stack consists of Game servers (a mix of them primarily survival based like ark), email hosting for myself and some friends + no reply services for other internal services, my media stack, my file server, the firewall, a reverse proxy manager and my own programming projects/sites. Honestly the hardest part was the networking aspect of it, learning how to use proxmox was a trip because I hadn't used a containerized environment before outside of docker.

I think this articles being disingenuous with the no paycheck, there is more to Value than a paycheck. My self hosting while I may not be being paid for it, if I were to put my current setup on to remote hosting I would probably be paying roughly $150 to $200 a month for a private VPS this system allowed me to just spend $700 as a one-off and then minor maintenance costs if something failed, which for a project I intend to keep running regardless its the cheaper option.

As for the ideology of decentralization, yes there is some issues in regards to reliability, obviously these smaller side projects for self hosting aren't going to have the redundancies that the "proper" hosting is going to have. Like for example just last night my service went down because I lost power for about an hour and a half and my battery standby only had enough power for about 45 minutes of it. Being as most of my stuff is more personal based I'm not too concerned about the downtime but I could definitely see if it was a large scale project like a lemmy server it would be a little more distasteful.

Nah, self-hosting is still a solution. And when I self-host, I don't even need an internet connection to access my files, movies, photos, security cameras, etc.

Yes, we can fix privacy laws, and put in a lot of faith that they will be followed or that our data won't be lost/sold. But I think everyone benefits when they are in control of their own data.

What we need are more accessible self-hosting options so that even computer n00bs can set up and cut ties with these mega corps.

It’s a solution for me. 🤷

He’s right we need laws. He’s wrong that it’s a relief valve or that we take pressure off the heinous privacy violators. We aren’t even a rounding error to them. They don’t care.

the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience.

The same argument could have been used a century ago to claim that everyday people would never switch from trains to private cars, because the effort and cost of maintaining a car exceeds the skill and interest of most travelers. That may have been true at one point, and may be true again in the future—but it’s contingent on changing circumstances, not a categorical truth.

Either that, or it's the new way of installing applications on your own computer. These just happen to be web accessible.

I've self hosted long before the privacy/subscription nightmare of modern cloud/SaaS platforms was a thing. I do it because I enjoy it (and at the time I got started, I had crap internet so having good local services like offline Wikipedia was important).

Not everyone has to self-host. I run lots of services, mostly for myself, but friends and family who don't know a kernel driver from a school bus driver also use them. So the expectation that everyone self host is and always has been "pie in the sky". And that's okay.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place, you still do not own or control your data. You're still subscribing to services instead of owning software. You can't extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.

So rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another, pooling resources, and letting those interoperate with each other.

To make fun of an old moral panic in the 90s: "It's 11pm. Do you know where your data is?" Yep, it's down the street in Matt's house.