Why Self-Host?

interesting to find out there are self-hostable location tracking solutions as replacement for google location services and the like!

The control plane of Tailscale can even be self-hosted via the Headscale project:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

As for backups, I like both https://github.com/restic/restic and https://github.com/kopia/kopia/. Encryption is done client-side, so the only thing the offsite host receives is encrypted blobs.

Defining "self-host" so narrowly as meaning that the software has to run on a server in your home closet ensures that it will always remain niche and insignificant. We should encourage anything that's not SaaS: open source non-subscription phone apps, plain old installable software that runs on Windows, cloud apps that can easily be run (and moved) between different hosts, etc.

Anything that prevents lock-in and gives control to the user is what we want.

This era has been a long time coming.

We've known for decades now that the philosophy underpinning Free Software ("it's my computer and I should be able to use it as I wish") breaks down when it's no longer my computer.

Attempts were made to come up with a similar philosophy for Cloud infrastructure, but those attempts are largely struggling; they run into logical contradictions or deep complexity that the Four Essential Freedoms don't have. Issues like

1. Since we don't own the machines, we don't actually know what is needed to maintain system health. We are just guessing. Every new collected piece of information on our information is an opportunity for an argument.

2. Even if we can make arguments about owning our data, the arguments about owning metadata on that data, or data on the machines processing our data, are much murkier... Yet that data can often be reversed back to make guesses about our data because manipulation of our data creates that metadata.

3. With no physical control of the machines processing the data, we are de-facto in a trust relationship with (usually) strangers, a trust relationship that is generally not the case when we own the hardware; who cares what the contract says when every engineer at the hosting company has either physical access to the machine or a social relationship with someone who does, a relationship we lack? When your entire email account is out in the open or your PII has been compromised because of either bad security practices or an employee deciding to do whatever they want on their last day, are you really confident that contract will make you whole?

If there can be, practically, no similar philosophical grounding to the Four Freedoms, the conclusion is that cloud hosting is incompatible with those goals and we have to re-own the hardware to maintain the freedoms, if the freedoms matter.

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect...

What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending.

It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my emails, and if I want move providers, I simply change the DNS records of my domain. But I don't have any issues around mail delivery.