It’s wild how easy it is to live without owning anything digitally. Music, movies, photos, work files, everything lives on someone else’s server, and we just pay for access.
Convenient. Until your account gets locked, or the service decides to double the price overnight. I’ve had both happen.
So yeah, I’m basically a digital hoarder. I run a mini PC at home as a server. My music is in FLAC on a NAS. My photos sit on a drive I can hold in my hand.
Complicated? Definitely. The electricity bill is not pretty either. But my data is actually mine. Not at some company’s mercy, not subject to terms of service I never read.
Self-hosting is a lot of work for what most people get for free. But every time a service shuts down or changes its rules, I feel a little smug about it.