The future is not self-hosted

> Which raises the question: do they even own those books?

nop, but legislators should really force that anything bought without "deadline" also doesn't randomly disappear/cost extra no matter if you bought a license or not

in additions license with clear deadline should always be required to have a "be aware that this product has only a limited guaranteed availability of ... days/month/years _dialog_" which you need to agree on and which isn't allowed to be just another checkbox (which yes seems mean against companies, but their is no reason to not treat scam like, abusive business practices meanly. It's kinda the point of countries to fight against anything harming their citizens weather that is abusive business practices or violence .)

> My wife and I now have a computer in our house that runs open-source equivalents to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix. It syncs to all of our devices. It's secured behind our own VPN. And it's wholly, truly owned by us.

Good for you. But for most people, it is an endeavor with zero gain, meaning no positive impact to their daily life, if not full of negative impact.

The reason why giving this storage and control over to any company doesn't work is because their incentives are always towards enshitiffication. The issue of community access can always be solved by self hosting on a rented cloud server, its still your data under your control its just someone elses box with a high speed internet connection and global accessibility, self hosting gives you the choice who sees and uses it and how. The hardware isn't actually the important bit, its the software.

I think its not the future in its current form either, because it requires too much configuration and maintenance for typical users, although NAS devices do it quite well and easily nowadays. But I also think that the cost of having Amazon et el do the maintenance has resulted in a lot of downtime that wipes out the internet every month or so for hours at a time and with the data theft and abuse and ever increasing profit extraction.

It is not just that it is a lot of work, it is that you lose power, or add a lot of risk. The example doesn't mention backups at all - when (not if) the computer fails then what? How do you access this cloud when not at home - again I didn't see this. How do you share data (only some please) with friends? How will you handle zero-days if the attacker decides to attack you - will you even notice or be the bad guy on the internet enabling attacks on others? Once you get things working when/how will you update - I've had several services that worked good until I updated and something in the config didn't migrate correctly and so it doesn't work.

I have some self hosted things, but because of the above I'm realizing that it is better to find someone to pay to take care of things for me. Someone large enough to get a sysadmin around 24x7, do trail upgrades, write the software/features... Unfortunately finding someone you can trust to do the above is important, and for many things there is no option.

I will likely always run jellyfix (or similar) for legal reasons. However for most things it would be better to pay someone I trust.

> And I don’t remember any story of them ever doing it even for the NSA. Do you?

Is this meant to be tongue in cheek?