The future is not self-hosted

To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk

I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality.

To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.

But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:

* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.

* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.

* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.

* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)

* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.

If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.

I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.

Is it such crazy of an ask to have some it guys sell me the box already set up to be used as a self-host solution aio ? Why can't I find any company that sells this?

The material difference with the Internet is ROI. If you're going to attack your enemies, the ROI of a troll farm is thousands of times higher than that of a standing army and a conventional military campaign. The ROI of an AI-powered automated troll farm is even higher.

The result is a kind of anti-literacy. Most people can read the words, comparatively few people are media-literate enough to filter truth from lies with any reliability. So the current media landscape is unusually poisonous. It's mostly vested interests lying to you and trying to manipulate you, through ads, troll farms, and mainstream media.

The fix would be AI filtering of content. Right now there's no chance whatsoever of that working accurately, but it's possible in principle to counteract the rise of AI disinformation with AI critiques of it.

Among all of the other revolutionary changes promised by AI, that possibility has flown under the radar. But it would be a political and economic showstopper if implemented, because everyone would suddenly be seeing authoritative, accurate news and analysis - like old-school fairness doctrine journalism, but better because it could presented at a level that matched the reader, while also allowing questions.

Ironically Grok was doing something like this for a while, until it... wasn't any more.

Paying $10/yr for a domain is well worth the cost just to be free of attaching your entire digital life to a gmail etc account that can be easily taken from you with no recourse.

But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.

There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.